If you see that I’ve edited some of my posts/comments, it’s most likely a grammatical error or a spelling mistake I’ve fixed as I’m not a native speaker :)
Last time I used Mint, the ffmpeg version was so disgustingly old that I couldn’t play YouTube videos I had downloaded. I understand why it’s recommended to beginners so much, but I think that something like Bazzite which has much newer software in its repos is much better if one wants everything to just work.
You should switch off from Manjaro because of their track record, not because of the AUR attack.
The official recommendation has always been to review them manually, but realistically, who does that for every package?
How many AUR packages do you install? It doesn’t take that long to review a PKGBUILD once, and then review only the changes every update.
This is the one I use:
https://store.kde.org/p/2116993
You still need to enable third-party repositories like RPMFusion on Fedora for a lot of packages, which may annoy the average beginner. Immutability is really not an issue for most use cases, and if it is then Nobara also exists.
No outdated package is the fault of the package manager. The software in Mint’s (and also Debian’s) apt repositories are just old because they are long-term support distros.