I recently bought a fairly expensive laptop with Windows 11 already loaded. Come the 24H2 update, the laptop crashed giving me just a blank screen. I tried all sorts of things but the range is not great when you start with a blank screen. In the end I had to reinstall the whole thing. Fortunately it being a laptop, the amount of software I had to install was not too great although it took me a while to get rid of Copilot, Edge and Bing again and add Classic Shell which converts the screen easily back to my preferred Windows 7 lookalike.
Meanwhile my PC with Windows 10 (which has quite a bit of software installed) continues to work very well. I am not paranoid about personal security, having what I think is sensible protection against various forms of malware, etc.; I take care not to open unknown links. I shall stick with this until it is time for a general update or it breaks down, and then ask my local guy to make me a new PC with Windows 11 (or 12 by then?).
So my answer to the original question is to agree that - if it aināt broke, donāt fix it.
Yes, that was generally my approach throughout my hands on It career. Even forty years ago as a mainframe systems programmer I only apply selective patches to fix a problem I had, never a full service update. My peers in other data centres would apply the full service pack and spend the next three months struggling to fix the problems the updates had caused 
. IBM even sent their systems engineers over to my shop to be trained.
Iām completely out of date on Windows, I havenāt used it really since I retired in 2011. Though I still have Parallels W10 and W11 VMs on my iMac just in case. Iām not sure W10 works anymore on Apple silicon and since Parallels is, like so many other rip off merchants, pushing users towards subscription, Iāll probably dump it and Windows for good soon.
As an aside, since the great Steve Jobs left us Iāve noticed Apple updates on MacOS, IOS, etc. become more and more frequent. This I put down to sloppier and sloppier development, which Jobs would never have tolerated. Of course, software quality has never been a priority for Microsoft, but itās sad to see Apple slipping too.
I think that if I were really determined to continue using W10 for specific software, provided performance was still adequate, Iād consider air-gapping the device from the internet and using something with current security to contact the outside world.
Sorry, Iām not really a computer buff. What does āair-gappingā mean?
Sorry again to bother you with asking. I asked Perplexity instead and found a lengthy exposition. Iām afraid that I am not that paranoid. The things I avoid include all smart media and most advertised goods. I have no interest in crypto or any other āoffersā. Now in my 80s, I find little to worry me in my incoming mails and messages.
Itās means not having the computer connected to the internet.
As BB said, itās not being connected to the internet, either directly or through another computer on a network.
At work I have air-gapped computers for some equipment because the required security software would prevent the computers from operating their connected equipment. Also windows updates can sometimes break software, so itās much better to have a computer as a stand-alone unit that never needs updates. Data transfer is by controlled memory stick.
Total overkill for a home machine.