Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.
No, they were very responsible. They knew the updates are likely going to be UX downgrades, slow the machine down, make it bluescreen more, or possibly even brick it. That was the experience around Vista/7. That's still the experience today, maybe sans the bluescreen.
The cardinal sin of Microsoft and every other company pushing automatic updates is update commingling. Mixing up security patches (which users need and might even want) with generic bug fixes (which users need and like) with feature updates (which users don't need, and rightfully don't like). As long as all of those are mixed, updating is a risky job, and many users will responsibly decide not to do it.
A large number of users were not patching because they believe they didn't need to, and they weren't educated well enough.
Raising the competency of the users is part of the responsibility.