“This is another case where automatic background updates on plugins can quietly save the day.”

Yes, and that’s good, but I suspect that in future we’re also going discover all the ways in which automatic background updates on plugins can turn your website into the white screen of death whilst you were sleeping. New code isn’t automatically better, nor automatically worse, than old code. In reality, there’s a mix. Hopefully there will be a throttling mechanism applied so that at first only a few sites get the automatic updates, so that it’s only the unfortunate few for whom a buggy update melts their web presence, rather than world+dog.