I did run pacman -Rdd successfully as suggested. Then I followed it with pacman -Syyuw , which had been running while I was doing other stuff. However in the meantime my VM froze for whatever reason (I suspect some disk space constraint after 1.4Gb of updates), therefore I can’t report (for now at least) any results.
I had previously tried the pamac upgrade command, but since it led to some ‘broken dependency’ message very similar to the ones originally issued by pacman, I had dismissed it without noticing it was a WARNING, not an error like the pacman one. It might probably have run to a good conclusion as well.
About the ‘known issues’ from the announcement threads: Yes I had routinely paid due attention to them in the past. In this particular case however, there were 19 threads for all the updates I had skipped, so I just checked the most recent one. And Google failed to provide any further hints, that’s why I ended up asking here.
For the record, here’s one of the announcement threads where this issue was spelled out:
Back to my original issue: I’ll probably have to hunt down a backup for my VM and restart from scratch, as the current running one has seemingly been drawn into a black hole. Oh well, s*** happens…
Thank you guys again. Cheers and take care !