But unless things changed quite a bit (I am still on 10.11.6) doesn't Apple always give you the option to update or not update MacOS? Even with iOS it's a positive action, you have to click something to update, no? I am fine with that, I just want to do the updates on my schedule, not Apples and Microsoft's. On macOS I have a lot of dev stuff setup and I would be pretty pissed if it did an update without me specifically and affirmatively concerning to it.

Any examples? I do programming on my MacBook Pro 2015 with several databases and 10+ language runtimes installed and very rarely had any issue at all.