> She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason

Unless you are in the IT industry or at least an enthusiast, this is a rational approach.

I'm in the IT industry, and it's my approach. I changed my desktop from fluxbox to xfce about 10 years ago, but have much the same keyboard shortcuts as I did 20 years ago, and the occasional icon has appeared in the dock as time progressed (namely volume, battery, wifi). I still use xplanet as my desktop for the rare times I see it, and I certainly don't have any icons on the desktop.

Actually the opposite. Unless you work in IT, you likely don't understand changelogs or release notes very well. Unless you can assess the risk of not updating, the safe approach is to auto update everything. Yes, it may be annoying and you may run into new bugs.

On the other hand: Your USB ports stopped working? You should've been updating the bios. You got breached via the browser or email app? Should've been updating them.

Kind of sad that our industry standard is: you need to put up with us changing shit on you all the time so that things can keep working.

If I were a marketer, which clearly I am not, I would think it would be bad marketing to have your computer constantly be telling you "HEY, you need to drop what you're doing to apply this fix for me at random, because if you don't someone is going to install ransomware. Oh and by the way, we're going to install Candy Crush Saga with this, because fuck you."

Maybe the person not updating isn't rational, but if every update is fucking candy crush I couldn't blame them for saying "maybe microsoft is worse than the hackers"