Yes, I too have been burned by updates. The theme one of my clients uses has WooCommerce, and when I updated it, the site was so broken I had to restore via database and FTP to get it back. Then, 3 days later there was an update for the theme that involved updates to the theme itself and patches to the theme. After I applied the theme update THEN I could do the WooCommerce update without breaking anything. Nasty. Truly, I would like to get rid of that theme completely but I can't without a major rewrite.

There are probably a lot of WordPress users who really have no idea how things work on the back end. They buy a theme with a proprietary editor, do an innocent looking plugin update - and Bam! WSOD. Tread lightly.