I was paralyzed with panic when my mac randomly shutdown, and did a 1 hour update, thinking it was upgrading to big sur.

Thankfully it was something else, and I was able to keep catalina.

I refuse to be a QA engineer for apple for no pay. Running one OS version behind has worked really well so far.

fwiw, I was of the same opinion and update cadence, but then just installed Big Sur (from Mojave) and it's been totally fine. The only exception is that Omnifocus 2 bugs out a bit and shows a graphical artifact that they refuse to patch.

It’s not a great sign when the earliest OS X success dev success story is refusing to patch bugs :(

That’s a sincere frown. I don’t use Omni’s apps but I’m really disappointed that the high quality of the Mac app ecosystem is basically gone.

I agree, although in fairness they've come out with a v3 that's fully supported. Since it's only marginally different, and aesthetically less appealing, I haven't bothered buying it.