I'd wish this remained the case. As a Fedora workstation user (XFCE spin), it consists of a couple of steps, and a reboot for the upgrade. Now the annoying part where they started a couple of releases back to Windowsify the experience, with a nice upgrade screen that makes my computer useless until it installs the thousands of packages. I guesstimate (pessimistically), between the download time and installation time, it takes between 1-2 hours to upgrade the version (had to install around 4k packages the other day for the F38 upgrade).
I'm quite sure they won't improve the upgrade process as they are definitely going to try with time to push the Silverblue/Kinoite (GIMP/KDE immutable distribution spins) further onto users. To speed it up for us that don't want to switch our flow, definitely torrents for package downloads, and smarter update packages would help (having the same package version on F37 & F38, but with a f38 naming suffix ideally shouldn't cause a full package reinstall).
Learning to get things done with only the terminal, i3 and a web browser was a big upfront task, but the result is that my setup does not have much requirements, both resources and dependencies. I've been using that setup for 7 years now without suffering from breaking changes. And when wayland is stable enough, i can switch to sway.
Would be much faster if the final rootfs was packed into the cpio. But if i pack the cpio onto the disk, its not that different from using a regular disk image.
However I couldn't be in more disagreement, even more than when I started reading it.
Yeah, it's definitely easy to convince ourselves that getting the latest and greatest is important or that availability of software trumps all else.
But do you know why I have 20year old rolling release installations of linux still running? Because there is quality control.
The reason that in 2004 I could reinstall Windows XP and all my drivers inside 25 minutes was because I had done it so freaking often. Windows of today is not significantly better, it's basically a CPU fighting pit of software that seeks to add their own special updaters and their own special UI subsystems and their own special tracking hardcoded with their own distributed libraries and eventually full of all kinds of disgusting nasty security holes.
I mean, it's less bad than all that, but Linux is usually a single command and the whole system is upgraded, with a QA approved, security patched and moderately vetted version of all the software you have selected. With no special jails or layers of indirection and linked to your system in a way that is at least moderately optimised for the intended design goal of the distro.
We should be aware of what we trade away when we decide that package managers don't work; because frankly linux users used to lord it all over windows and OSX users that they were the only ones with a hard won and working package manager for the whole OS.
For sure though: if I have to choose between running a docker container to run the hip and trendy version of `nc` or not having that software available... Then I choose not having that software available, because frankly speaking: those gatekeepers serve a purpose.