I literally sat for 30 minutes on a slow work laptop that still had a spinning rust drive once after turning it on waiting for Windows to finish an update it started the night before when I told it to install updates and shut down instead of just shut down. It was quite embarrassing waiting in front of a client before I could get any work done.

Usually it's pretty ok but I remember once being in an online PvP match and windows decided right then it NEEDED to update and started the process. It just went into update mode and restarted (oh so slowly) - my guess is there was a popup that I didn't see due to being in-game and it just went ahead and overrode whatever I was doing to update.

Happened to me once. I came home from workz and just wanted to watch some TV series on VLC before bed. Instead, Windows update told me it was upgrading and I only had the choice to delay for one minute. Okay, whatever, I thought. I let it happen. Then hours passed. Hours more. I just went to bed while it updated. In the morning, I had a new version of Windows I never asked for, and it never told me it was instaling.

Oh it works if you're always not in a hurry. Try not clicking that for a few days and it will decide that it's ok to shutdown your computer in the middle of a meeting.

On personal PC maybe not, but when you're using a Windows PC for work that is enrolled and controlled by your IT, the update can be enforced and there's no way to postpone it from your side.

I think it is more gentle when you actually use the OS, but OP says they don't use it a lot. I basically don't use Windows a lot for so many reasons, but in the odd occasion I need to use it, it's like OP's experience. There are so many updates and the thing insists on installing them, or you think it's gonna be okay to install them --accostumed to pacman, apt or whatever. If you agree or click on Install updates as they recommend, there you go into the rabbit hole of Windows updates.