The fundamental fail is relying on each application to have an update policy you prefer thus needing to fix the same problem over and over and over. The solutio

The fundamental fail is relying on each application to have an update policy you prefer thus needing to fix the same problem over and over and over. The solution is package management where you fix the problem exactly once and have some hope of tackling it. Although this isn't natively how mac handles software there are package managers for mac which could tackle this aspect. If you want to update less often then you need someone to spend time classifying updates as more or less vital and this is fundamentally a problem. All updates contain fixed bugs and those bug fixes are often blueprints suitable for malicious actors to exploit systems even if the bug wasn't considered a security issue. That is to say all updates are security updates. The obvious solution instead of only selectively installing updates to your browsers and other vital software is to be selective instead about when to apply them and restoring state afterwards. Firefox helpfully already can restore itself after update. You could for example having updates happen at an hour you are reliably sleeping rather than whenever. On a system with package management I would solve this by either leaving the machine on and scheduling updates, having it wake on a schedule if bios supported, or waking it with wake on lan. This does require SOMETHING to be on. In my house I would use the single board computer I use for other purposes and have it simply wake my machine and use ssh to tell it to update then go back to sleep.