I find this quote strangely compelling but it does not really align with the evidence.

At just the surface level, if the second statement was true, Debian (perhaps the oldest distro with a package manager) would not have the same market share as Arch Linux and dramatically less than Ubuntu.

And if the trend was towards less "cutting edge" distros, Arch and Cachey would not be gaining as rapidly in popularity as they clearly are.

You can tell where somebody lands on the opinion spectrum by the way they use the word "stable". Many people actually find "cutting edge" distros more robust then fixed version distros for a variety of reasons. As used in this quote, "stable" means "not changing" and not necessarily higher quality.