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I don't think anything other than Google Play can auto update unless you've rooted your phone.

F-droid has a package you can install to the system partition to allow auto-updating.

Android 12 has a mechanism to allow an app that installed an application to update it in the background, but the client needs to be updated to support it.

F-Droid hasn't yet, see issue here [1] - some of the other F-Droid clients, like Droid-ify have [2].

[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/1836

[2] https://github.com/Iamlooker/Droid-ify/pull/159

You don't need root AFAIK, you do need an unlocked bootloader so you can flash the system partition though.

Exactly, this is only tangentially related to rooting. Google doesn't need root on your device for their closed Play Services to install software, but the component that you want to have this installation capability does need some system-level permission. Many people grant it that by rooting the device, but installing something like /e/OS (=Android with microG and a few other improvements) is also a way to do this.

On my Moto FDroid does a decent job of keeping my apps updated. I still have to intervene about half of the time though.

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