Exactly!

How many updates did one apply to Windows 3.0 and Word in those days??

Sure, there might have been a “hotfix” available for download over a long distance BBS, but virtually nobody would have ever done so (even if they were lucky enough to have a modem). Maybe large companies applied such when impacted.

Even in the Windows XP days, I think windowsupdate.com was still a manually triggered process…

For a while, bundled drivers were a steaming pile of crap in quality and several generations of Windows suffered greatly until Microsoft got vendors in line and updates became common.