This isn’t something to be proud of. It means that you’re not applying the regularly-released security updates.
macOS is spectacularly good at restoring state on reboot. It’s like it never happened.
Update your software.
Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.
Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.
Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.
I don't disagree, but also...
I find it a bit surprising that this is still a thing. Why is there ever a time when I _must_ reboot? Is it just that mainstream kernels were designed at a time when people had lower expectations around this sort of thing, and now it's too hard to evolve their designs toward something that would allow for zero-downtime patching in ~all cases?
Other examples that make me wonder if it's mostly because people haven't demanded better:
- Enormous updates for all kinds of things (gigabytes for a bug fix release) because differential updates aren't pervasive. - Windows updates where a huge amount of work is done during the "rebooting" phase (why can't most of this be done before reboot?) - Absolutely atrocious power management on pretty much anything that's not a MacBook, and even not perfect on those.
I never thought we'd have flying cars by now, but if you asked me a decade ago to predict the future of operating systems... it wouldn't be this.