An HOA (home owners associations) can say what color you can paint your house, What you can plant in your yard, What you can have in your driveway, and some even say what color your blinds can be.
Microsoft controls your computer, they say what info is sent back to Microsoft, and they say when you must upgrade. They can shut down your computer when they want whether you like it or not.
So far, and since I have been running Debian for a while now I don’t know about Ubuntu specifically, All the distros I have used either show an update is available, or you check for updates.
You have the choice and control to install the update and can do it later if now is not a good time. Or don’t install it at all, it’s your system.
Or like Fedora (and I’m sure more distros) nicely asks you if you want to update in a user initiated restart or shutdown, and if you say yes it does just that and updates to restart or shut down. My memories with Windows are having to remain in front of the computer to make sure I can turn it off after it reboots multiple times to update.
Obviously, yes. My point is: Do you read and understand all changes in the code for each update? You need to trust the maintainers, cause they could theoretically push out any code with the update.
This is true of any OS, The people who build the OS for you to use can build in all kinds of sneaky stuff - see “Trusting Trust” about an invisible trojan in the C compiler. An issue with Microsoft Vs. Most Any Linux is the whether the maintainer’s goals and the User’s goals are oriented in the same direction. Microsoft wants to get data about you for whatever purpose whereas Most Any Linux maintainer’s main goal is to produce an OS that is as free of bugs and is as useful and as secure as possible.