In reply to Herman Near.

I have not disabled auto-updates on any of my sites and am very supportive of the core teams intentions with auto-updates. BUT I have to agree that breaking any plugins on point releases is a very bad outcome. It will almost certainly lead to more people disabling auto-updates, which is a bad result for everyone.

While I've never had a problem, we have had a few people reporting problems with auto-updates in the WordPress Linkedin Group for various different reasons.

It was my understanding that people can and should let point releases run because it is very unlikely they will break your site.

Maybe my interpretation was wrong. Maybe it's just that auto-updates are very unlikely to break WordPress itself but with plugins and themes it can definitely happen, depending on coding practices.