Forced updates are bad if they bork you system, sure. If you know what you are doing it's also mostly fine to skip a few. But the truth of the matter is that 95% of users wouldn't ever update their system if they didn't have to. Then half of them infect their system with ransomware and the other half get to join a huge botnet.
We've had that before and I wouldn't want to go back. A few bored systems because of updates are probably preferable to at least as many lost to malware, where data is often unrecoverable.
The problem is that the all those apps installed as dependencies will get marked as unused and removed with the next --autoremove (which you should probably do regularly to clean up old kernels.
The real fix would be to mark all those apps as explicitly installed, but I don't use apt-based distros regularly so idk how.
Huh, seems you're right. I was under the impression this wouldn't work in dash but apparently that's wrong.