Windows updates before MS fired their QA department were uneventful, after they fired their QA department, serious issues started popping up every single month. Including server systems not booting anymore.
One of the reasons MS introduced "patch Tuesday" in 2003 was because Windows updates until then had been notorious for years for causing issues randomly, which their corporate users hated firefighting without warning. By rolling out their updates on a predictable schedule, corporate IT depts could set their calendar to keep a day (or two) per month clear to do post-update firefighting, or (if they were really on the ball) to make time for their own QA before releasing the update to the rest of the org.
So unless the QA firing you're talking about was more than a quarter-century ago, Windows updates have always been issue-laden shitshows.
Any issues were really minor. I worked for an MSP for most of the Windows XP through Windows 8 era and update problems were anomalies, not par for the course. If there were problems, they were newsworthy events.
One of the reasons MS introduced "patch Tuesday" in 2003 was because Windows updates until then had been notorious for years for causing issues randomly, which their corporate users hated firefighting without warning. By rolling out their updates on a predictable schedule, corporate IT depts could set their calendar to keep a day (or two) per month clear to do post-update firefighting, or (if they were really on the ball) to make time for their own QA before releasing the update to the rest of the org.
So unless the QA firing you're talking about was more than a quarter-century ago, Windows updates have always been issue-laden shitshows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday