It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn't have been the only config file they had to edit.
From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it's baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: "Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit."