[thot_experiment]

In the first bit you have not described why updates are necessary, you've given some reasons why updates can be useful. Opting into updates sometimes is fine. The context of the parent and grandparent posts is specifically security and security updates.

Security wise for most applications there's the oft overlooked possibility of just not connecting to the internet. Though when it comes to my personal experience running antivirusless Windows with updates disabled it has not been a problem for me for a decade now. According to my router I'm not part of a botnet either. It just doesn't seem necessary at all. Your attack surface as an individual on a reasonably well secured network is minuscule and your threat model is basically just the background radiation of bots trying whatever random exploits. Sure, I keep my router patched because it's on the edge, but other than that it doesn't matter.

Though I will give you that browsers are a special case where the tool is specifically used all the time to connect to potentially hostile content and give that content the ability to execute code on your machine. Things on the edge are a scenario where keeping up with security patches actually make sense.