There have been a number of updates in the last 3 years that would have completely broken or caused 500 errors on your Gitlab instance if you immediately updated it prior to a hotfix being released. If you didn't encounter these I would be shocked or you're keeping off bleeding edge releases (smart). I've managed private gitlabs for 4-5 years. I've submitted ~5-10 tickets regarding various things breaking (gitlab-runner, pages 500ing after an upgrade, etc).

If you give each update a few weeks/month and pay attention to the comments on each release blog you'll save yourself quite a bit of headaches.