That's my understanding as well. Afaik this is one of the reasons service packs existed, they essentially wrapped a huge number of updates up in one big, compli

That's my understanding as well. Afaik this is one of the reasons service packs existed, they essentially wrapped a huge number of updates up in one big, complicated blob labelled "this replaces update 329904, 1374663, 3072984, 3979717, ... 7308332, 8042597, 8091796, 9793445 and is applicable to basically all machines", coalescing a big chunk of their dependency tree.