@jwcph
From my personal experience, when ever a distro that I'm using has an OS update, there may be some non-system packages that are updated as well because the older software/packages may become incompatible. This happens on Windows as well but the difference is that the update manager in Linux distros will handle these updates automatically, instead of requiring the user to manually update their software.

@jwcph
It was already mentioned in this thread but you clearly seem to have either forgotten or you're blatantly ignoring it, but the dependencies aren't being updated to work with the new software, it's the software that needs to be updated to work with the new dependencies.That is why you sometimes need to install additional packages when software is being updated.

@jwcph
Out of everything I've seen someone say about #Linux, this is probably to most bizarre. I'm so confused by this post that I genuinely don't know how to respond to it. I've never heard of anyone having such an issue with keeping their system fully updated. I mean, if it's that much of an issue for you, than just use AppImages and Flatpacks, but you really should keep everything updated for security reasons.