Instead of being afraid of updates you should be able to rollback any problematic updates and be impossible to end up in a broken system because updates interrupted. The only distros offering that are NixOS and GuixSD.
That's a great start, but does not help if the data was also affected. For instance, running a new version might have upgraded a database to a newer format, or added new data with a format that the older version does not understand.
True, schema upgrades are an issue which hasn't been discussed[1]. Maybe some kind of versioning or pre-update backup in case of non-invertible data upgrade could help?