thanks, that's better advice . i saw that openssl-1.1 package but it didn't occur to me to use it :p ( i just extracted the old libs out of the old package in cache)
pacman is now in obarun repo and is all good again (thanks eric)
i notice though there seems to be a curious thing with sudo, currently requiring both openssl-1.1 and openssl-3.0 (though not declared)
ldd /usr/lib/sudo/sudoers.so | grep libssl
libssl.so.3 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.3 (0x00007f4047a21000)
libssl.so.1.1 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.1 (0x00007f4047905000)
to be clear, this is an arch anomaly, and easily dealt with via the openssl-1.1 package, just not automatically so.