I feel your pain and i would lie if a k8s update never caught me off guard, but there are still policies you can set for the autoupdate of k3s or trigger them manually at will.
have a look at k3s and maybe you will like kubernetes more again. There is no magic to it. Have a faulty node? spin up a new one.
And if your hoster is kind enough, there will even be apis with cloudinit for you to do that.
Im not trying to imply that you need a managed k3s with this post, but rather trying to show how easy kubernetes can be if you leave the big clouds and try not to overcomplicate things.