It happened once in the last ten years (thanks Nvidia). But I just rolled back to my previous btrfs snapshot and kept on computing until it was fixed a day or two later.

But forced breaking updates the first Tuesday of every month sounds like a really bad user experience.

Things were different back in the 90s before loadable kernel modules. Online updates weren't much of a thing, either. You'd just install that new slackware release over your old root partition anyway.