This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"
On any given day, at least one of Windows, Firefox, VSCode, or myriad other less important apps wants to update before it runs. Talk about pessimising app start times! App start time is now the time to download and reinstall!
Windows FCU silently borked 6 of my machines by steamrolling drivers I had carefully selected for stability and performance. Broke GPU and Wifi on 5 of those, and it took me half a day to figure out what changed. On my main dev machine, Windows Update got into an infinite loop of churning the disk 100% and never finishing. Every fix I tried did nothing, until finally I disabled all WU services.
So in resignation, I did install Ubuntu. And was quickly reminded why I don’t use it. Ironically, the productivity-killer there is also about updates: for any app I need to run properly, I have to update its whole lineage of dependencies, often manually, and work out which versions it likes.
So I’m reluctantly back to Windows. I’ve just changed all the update settings I can find to ask me or just leave me alone and let me get a little work done.
To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this.
I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it. For pro users, shouldn't be rebooting, for most users, they shouldn't notice.
It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.
If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.
This is something I've found fault with in Windows, and was greatly disappointed to see happen in Sierra.
I had been getting the High Sierra update reminder notification once a day for several days and normally just clicked "Remind me tomorrow" (since there's no option for "Don't remind me"). One day after having it pop up, I instead clicked "Try in an hour".
I expected this to ask me again in an hour, at which point I would choose whether or not to proceed with the update. Instead, while my MacBook was asleep with work open, it went ahead and updated the OS without my consent.
I don't (think) I lost any work, as I typically save things and Vim didn't leave any swp files. But the experience was disconcerting and bitterly reminiscent of Windows...
Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.
Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.
Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.
This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.
But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.