> I’m convinced that updating so much more often is worse, not better.

The issue of cooldowns aside (which is about delaying updates, not reducing their frequency): you're going to have the same set of problems when you update, whether you do it frequently or infrequently. The difference is that if you update frequently, you'll have a smaller set of updates (so it's easier to debug) and you'll have more opportunity to report issues upstream and fix them in a timely fashion.

It's the same underlying problem as CI and build time. Most people abandoned the concept of projects that take so long to build you can only do testing once a week, because CI that runs on every PR provides a much better experience. This is the same lesson applied to updates.

My logical read of the situation is that I end up making fewer overall “changes” if I end up upgrading a dependency once, not thrice, to a specific version. And the changes are their own source of risk.