Absolutely, but unless you’re on a rolling release, it still won’t be that long. For example, my homelab ubuntu server didn’t get updated for over a month, but when I finally did run updates it finished after no more than a minute. Depends a bit on hardware and network speed though.
It shouldn’t be an issue even on a rolling release. I mean it’s not like it installs every intermediary version of every package, it just jumps to the latest versions no? At least that’s how I imagine it works.
You have to cut Microsoft some slack on mandatory updates. They’re still traumatized from the XP era when they were the platform of choice for botnets and “Windows security” was a laughing stock.
Tbh, if Linux had the same user base as windows had back then a large amount of people would postpone any update indefinitely and we’d be in the same shit.