You are mixing up Auto Save with Auto Recover. In Word, your first line of defense is explicitly saving the document. Perhaps if clicking the button is too difficult you could hit Ctrl-S? That's what I do.

Failing explicitly saving your document, you could program Word to Auto Save your document every minute if you wanted to. This doesn't bring up (or even create) different revisions of the document. It literally is just as if you clicked the Save button (or hit Ctrl-S).

Failing the Auto Save - maybe you have it set to 10 minutes and you typed for 9 minutes when your computer crashed? You have Auto Recover. That's where Word automatically detects that Something Bad happened and shows you the last few times it made a copy of your Word environment for you (which includes your document).

So, three levels of protection that work pretty well for most people.

some stupid side bar pops up with a number of revisions of documents that I instincively ignore. Cancel, go away! I'm busy! Oh, now I've lost that work.

Perhaps you would be less busy if you weren't ignoring popups that were attempting to help you save your work.

My honest assessment is that you want your real work on Surface to be as easy and fun as your Subway Surfers on iPad.