This happened to me on arch recently. I updated pacman but it didn’t warn me it needed an updated glibc. Now pacman refuses to run.
It should be easy enough to repair but it was just an old laptop I wanted to test something on so I ended up throwing the laptop back in the draw instead.
The good thing about arch packages being just tar archives is when pacman fails, you can often fix it by `tar xf` ing the right packages at the root. It's ugly but it works most of the time
It should be easy enough to repair but it was just an old laptop I wanted to test something on so I ended up throwing the laptop back in the draw instead.