It's doing the updates automatically in the background, but it applies them on the next reboot. It's easy to change that and manually update but I like how unintrusive it's been - I've had to go and check to make sure my machine is actually updating. And if for whatever reason the update breaks something I can roll it back and still have a working computer and deal with tinkering later, but it hasn't broken yet. I'm on Bazzite. It's opinionated and I definitely wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I really like it.
I despised Windows doing it automatically too, but that mostly had to do with how long it took, when it did it, and what those updates were. I think if Windows did updates like Bazzite, in the background while the computer isn't under heavy load, rather than taking five + minutes at shutdown when you just want to go to bed, and you never boot back up to find out that the update was nearly unremovable AI garbage or ads, it's better.
For the casual users who just want their computer to work, I think it's a good way of doing it if you can't do live patching for whatever reason, but for the OS as a hobby folks (I get it, no shade, lol) that you sometimes see in Linux spaces online, manual updates can be part of the fun.