You are focused too much on Microsoft and the individual user. The concepts are applicable to any device from any manufacture. The book I linked is about the evolution and history of network spread malware such as bots. It discusses about how security was always an afterthought during the start of the millennium, and how at a certain point basically every device was running some malware. Then collectively the industry and the government finally started to understand the nature of the beast and introduced security hardening best practices.

This is continuing today, and the increased knowledge sharing has industries working together to fight the problem. Even the US government has learned from e.g. google and started to move to 0-trust network architecture: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

Automatic updates are one of the biggest enablers of stopping automatic spreading of malware. The Mirai botnet for example had a large capacity knocked out thanks to Deutsche Telekom responding and force updating their network devices which were vulnerable attack vectors. Unfortunately there are a lot of devices out there which are out of support or have no updates available (i.e. internet of shit), which remain a constant problem.

Automatic updates are the industry standard, because the days an patched or unpatched device is a threat to the internet is 0. This doesn't mean patching is futile. It still greatly reduces the available attack surface, and also helps protect other devices.

You should also be aware the when 0-day gets patched, they often happen silently. e.g. Linux will obfuscate it's commit message, because if they say 'e.g. fix really bad 0 day', then immediately that 0-day becomes public knowledge and will be exploited even more before the patch is live and propagated to the systems. Same in release notes, so people don't diff the binary to discover what the attack vector was. Just because it's not loudly announced, doesn't make it not real.

So please do your minimum part to practice network hygienic if you want to participate. It is not a 'dilemma', it is polite behavior for a greater goal.