Atleast when you get a prompt you know why stuff fails afterward. Debugging silent auto update issues is a nightmare.
With developer tools it's different. Your tool stops working and suddenly you cannot work. You often can't just change the tool either, without having to rewrite stuff. For this, it's necessary that versions stay the same until we're ready to upgrade. Same goes for libraries you're using and so on.
Perhaps Docker could learn from this and only auto-update to versions which have been used by a large audience for N weeks with no regression reports.
Only when that becomes untrue for a sustained period of time should you turn off updates, but at that point, you're just sticking to a single pinned version until you're able to switch to a competitor.
Vendors who just keep pushing user-hostile shit should lose customers, not (just) updaters.
I think it should be the user's choice. This trend in slow rollouts to see what breaks and using users for beta testing is annoying.
It pretty much always just... works. New exploits just get patched out.
Of course, with the exception of the new "Gutenberg" editor, WP has always been ultra conservative in terms of major usage change.
You don't notice all the updates that are flawless.