More like "frequency of bugs" developers put out for their games. Best to buy only once the "GOTY/Definitive/Special edition" is released and all DLC's are available and when it's a couple of years and 50 patches old - including patches fixing the patches. And when the game is on holiday discount sale. The game is then smooth and playable with no blood-pressure inducing defects and doesn't need too much Googling/forum-posting on asking what went wrong.

It seems there is a window of ideal time. You've described when that window opens. It closes as OS's evolve out from under the last patch. Steam in particular appears in no hurry to require games be playable after any initial QA.

I don't want to be forced to install one-way updates just to play a single-player game.

Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.

I don't buy games in a broken state hoping they'll be good later. Either I wait until they're done or don't buy them at all.

And I refund if it's bad and I didn't know it in advance. Steam refund experience has been great but they started warning me about "refund is not for trying games". Good things don't last forever but they day they start to BS me I will go back to piracy or give up on DRM titles.