I got Windows Long-Term Service Branch (LTSB, now LTSC for Long-Term Service Channel) for precisely this reason.
After having an update happen at a bad time, one closing a file I hadn't yet saved, and another killing a process of computations I had been leaving to run overnight, I decided that I wanted to use my computer the way I saw fit, not the way someone else saw fit. If someone cannot wrap their head around the idea that I might leave a process running while I sleep, or that I might forget to save something in a program that doesn't have an autosave feature, well, they're not considering all of the use cases.
For giggles, after LTSB I did "all the things" to get rid of forced updates on one particularly infrequently-used tablet and, as an experiment, left it unpatched for slightly over a year before seeing what would happen once I finally let it do its thing. For one, the updates took about three and a half hours, which I thought was interesting; just re-installing would likely be faster.
More interesting, though, was that the world did not end because I had not patched this tablet.
I get aiming at the eighty percent of your users who just would not think to update, but being that hostile to the other twenty percent who are aware of updates and still would like that control is annoying. It is sad to see that this kind of thinking has made its way to Linuxland, which I had imagined to be the last bastion of "we're doing this for your own good."