I consume the news via "eselect news". Interestingly, the list of items is kept around separately from the state of the metadata/news/ folder but the contents are not. How annoying. I keep a gentoo box from 2009 around for a few things, it has 130 news items listed, oldest from 2009-04-18, though in the listing most of them say "removed?" at the end. Goes to show how often I pay attention to the old items if I never really noticed this before, they removed a bunch of them in 2019. I think it's a dumb thing to do, and probably encouraged by their own unforced change in 2015 that put everything top-level instead of organized by year subdirectories.
Python I'll give you, I forgot about 3.12 becoming the default this month, I have an explicit version set in a package.use file that I'll change when I'm ready because I've been burned before. Part of this I blame on Python; overall I've been pretty happy with python on gentoo though, it still lets me have python 2 around for some things. On a Mint laptop I had to install tauthon outside of its package manager.
I read the dracut news item, determined there were no actions required for me (zfs-kmod has the initframfs flag on), and nothing broke. Rereading it again, yeah, it's kind of a sucky change in defaults, but it's clear in what people who might be affected should do.
The profile 23 upgrade is part of the same split/merged usr upgrade, it's clear about the potential scenarios to be worried about (CHOST not being one for most users, a newer gentoo system never set it in the make.conf and my old one's had it commented out for however long.) Note that you could always ignore the profile update for about a year, it's not something that has to be dealt with right away.
For the initramfs thing, it's important to note that it's only required if you have / and /usr on separate filesystems. My old box has them on one filesystem and even after moving it to the un-merged profile 23 I still don't use an initramfs for it. There was originally a news item in 2013, referenced by the item in January of this year, about having them on separate filesystems being unsupported without initramfs. I think 11 years for end-users that could have been impacted by this to deal with it is more than reasonable.
Glancing through the news list, the one on 2024-02-01 about grub updates resulted in a broken boot for me, I think I should have just ignored it. The item last December about CUPS didn't break anything but I can see how it easily could if ignored. I'm still annoyed that they've dropped layman but layman still works as-is. Overall, I do think things have been somewhat less stable in the last 4 years. Even just on news items (that could have impacted my old box, anyway) there's been 49 since 2020, while in the 10 years of April '09 to 2019 there were 81, though 2023 only had 3 items.
There is of course some fighting, and sometimes some turbulent periods of more frequent fighting, but it's still not every few weeks or even months and a lot of the time the fight is yours to accept/decline at your choosing.
A week before that, they upgraded python without bumping all the python packages (kicad comes to mind, edit: ansible deps are frequently broken).
In March, profile 23 wants you to remove your CHOST, which sounds like a good way to break systems, thankfully you can ignore them and keep it set.
Back in February they broke something tied to wine/mono/dotnet without testing it.
Back in January they pretty much made split usr users require an initramfs (I was already using one but I digress).
I'm sure there were some more recent ones, but they like to remove the "news" messages quite frequently and I'm too lazy to dig through git logs.