The reasonable way of installing things "manually" on Arch is to still use pacman and write your own package, just like what is done with the AUR. It's not rocket science and avoids any potential issue. Been using Arch for years and never managed to bork anything. (And yet, I have once by an unfortunate mistake deleted the /boot partition, and could build it back without a hitch.)
Now manually installing something outside of pacman is still OK if whatever you install doesn't overwrite any file that could have been installed using pacman. That's the case for many applications. But avoid doing this for any library though, this is a recipe for disaster. If in doubt, write a PKGBUILD and use makepkg and pacman. That will take care of that.
There is of course one direction it will work and one it won't. While pacman can detect that it would overwrite files that it didn't itself install, the opposite is of course not true. So in particular, if you're installing something manually through the typical make/make install, you could be overwriting existing files that had been installed using pacman. Which could be very nasty. That sounds like common sense.
But anyway, "manually" installing (so, outside of the package manager, and whatever the distribution) anything that could contain files that could be a dependency for existing packages installed via the package manager is an horrible idea.
Anyway, the OP got back on its feet as I got it. So they must be a happy camper.
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