I'm old enough to call myself old but fifteen years away from retirement and I do commercial work, but have past experience in home wiring. None of that matters. AFCIs do have problems, do cause nuisance trips, and don't have any ability to do anything to stop electrical fires in houses, aside from the ground fault protection ferreting some problems with miswired circuits and ground faults on damaged circuits.
Case and point, a mere two years ago my in-laws were doing a kitchen update and bought a new fridge. I ran a dedicated circuit from the panel to fridge, brother-in-law goes out to home desperate and comes back with a dual function breaker because he thinks it's going to be better and safer. Fridge randomly trips breaker for a week. Rip out the dual function breaker, install GFCI breaker and no more trips.
AFCIs don't work well with electronic loads. The manufactures have reduced the number of nuisance trips but they haven't gotten rid of them, and since AFCI tech is a black box how do we know if the tweaks are not removing whatever protection the breaker might have given during an actual arc event.
