I read this comment and realized I don’t even remember the last time I powered down my Mac! You’re right that it’s not something I do very often. Is that not the case with Windows and Linux nowadays? What’s the point in powering down?
For simpler userspace updates a restart of the relevant processes is easy enough, but it can be a bit more difficult when it comes to kernel updates.
(Updating a running kernel has been a thing in Linux for a number of years, but my systems don't do it.)
Even when you power down or restart a Mac it remembers all the applications you had running and all the application windows and it re-opens everything so you come back to everything just the way you left it.