In their defense, there was a pretty large subculture of technically knows-enough-to-be-dangerous people who would do everything in their power to totally disable Windows Update for various reasons.
Microsoft looked at this as compromising Windows' security and harming Microsoft's reputation. Their solution in Windows 10 was to make it much more difficult or impossible to delay or turn off updates for Home and Pro users. It's annoying as all hell for those who know what we're doing and do stay up to date. I hate it because it restarts in the middle of the night, then boots up into the Bitlocker screen - so when I get up in the morning I discover my desktop has been running at 100% CPU and blasting fans like a jet engine for god knows how many hours thanks to Windows update.
But at the same time, I can see why they did it, but there had to be a better way.
Unless you believe Microsoft intentionally designed the OS to hose your presentation by rebooting right when it believes you are doing one, this is incompetent/bad design, not "malicious" design.
Let's compromise and call it "depraved indifference". No update ever made is that important that it needs to boot me out of what I'm doing at the moment.
That's another thing that bugs the shit out of me, to the point that I made a passive-aggressive bug report out of it: The update process is 3-part, and two parts of them require your input after the first part, if your computer didn't automatically restart. First is the force shutdown "blue screen," which, with no restart, can leave your computer/laptop in a time-bomb "fuck you" state. Woops, forgot that the last time you turned off your computer, it was an update-shutdown? Hahaha, you need it for a presentation in five minutes? Jokes on you, we still have two update screens to go!
Then you have the black screen with the circle, and then the blue screens "we are configuring your updates and didn't touch your files".
Incompetence as an excuse can only go so far. It's not like Microsoft is unaware of or completely ignorant that people use their Windows systems for all kinds of things — sometimes even mission-critical things. Choosing to ignore an ill you created despite knowing the consequences it has on others is not incompetence.
"Telemetry" that can't be fully turned off. I mean off. Not "minimal", not "disabled", off.
By itself this isn't horrible, but it (and many other Windows features, for that matter) crosses into malware territory when it treats the user as hostile (like re-enabling itself or working around blocks like DNS)