In reply to Mike W.

WordPress should, imo, dictate the defaults based on what is best for the ecosystem. And what is best for the ecosystem is a more secure WordPress.

Do you remember the browser market before auto-update? Do you know how happy the web is now that legacy browsers are slowly becoming a thing of the past and we can take advantage of new features more quickly? Do you know how hard it is to fix security issues promptly when auto-update is not enabled?

So with WordPress there was always an issue with updates breaking plugins and themes. That hasn't changed, auto-update or not. The best plugins and themes are supported in such a way that these issues are minimized (good thing for devs to make their work stand out is, btw). It forces the developers to keep up to date and that's a good thing too because that means more diligence is paid to keeping code bases maintained so they are secure & robust.

It would be really bad to not set auto-update as the default because that encourages people to run outdated code. Vulnerabilities can have huge implications on a number of levels, not the least of which WP general reputation (on which now thousands of people rely on for their bread and butter).

Of course you always have the ability to modify and disable auto-updates. The freedom is there to be used at anyone's discretion.

If you are running an ecommerce store, I bet it would be better to test before doing updates instead of having a store potentially crash on the chance that a conflict occurs.

And it's just a fact of life, the web is fast moving and requires continual vigilance, it's a pain but unavoidable. Anybody running SSL and has had to reconfigure everything the past week knows it.

There are tools out there & tools yet to be created that can help manage the pain of updating. Rolling back if an update is resulting in problems is a useful thing. Having a proactive backup policy. Easier ways of testing and moving things from a staging site to production. Those are all things that can mitigate the pain of updating. Definitely for commercial sites an investment must be made in these kind of tools.