I have been upgrading after a few weeks of being too busy too. I constantly now run out of space on my 50GB root partition even when running -Sc after every update and reboot to make sure everything works...
It really is crazy that there is no option to put all the programs on another partition than root unless you make a separate partition for /usr that will somehow foresee what you will install in the future.
My /usr with all of my programs installed is 29GB and /var takes up 10 GB. That leaves just 10GB for everything else.
I have just followed the partitioning advice since my first 2016 install, but in the past few years, everything has just ballooned in size it seems and is now always a problem every few years no matter how big you make your root partition.
Is there a better solution for this? Can we place /usr files managed through managers in /home? I think that is against the pacman/yay way of working.
If it helps, I've got btrfs on my 128GB drive with /home and root as subvolumes.
When the volume started to fill, I moved /home to a new drive, should be right for a while now.