Yes, and the result was a billions of billions of combinations of those updates.
While the current system is far from being ideal, it's way easier to test with a reduced set of permutations.
And before you object, think of it this way - if the current shitshow is with a reduced set, imagine what it would be with a non reduced one. It wouldn't be a shitshow x 2 or shitshow^2, it would be around shitshow^99999.
I was recently talking to a colleague about this, and it was remarkable to me how "quickly" they had forgotten the hell of having Windows Update filled with 1 billion 10kb updates.
Once i had to fix a conflict during a Fedora version update. Apart from that it has been rock solid.
Windows 2019 cumulative updates are not bad, but 2016 is cursed. Be ready to put aside at least 90 mins for older 2016 installs, and cross your fingers it doesn't fail.
"Major Windows distro" has video, sound, peripheral, network drivers; user software which is not a part of the operating system updates, VisualC redistributables, .NET version and it runs on anything from $100 10 years old system which is not even officially supported[0] to the latest $$$$ laptops, which still has shitty drivers because anyone capable of writing a good driver is not working in Intel or Broadcom, or retired for 10 years already.
Comparing Linux and Windows update models is... quite a futile endeavour, they are different.
[0] but billg is still blamed for the BSODs despite that