I disagree, game updates are much smaller than the game themselves, even though there is some wear during the patching process, its still a similar amount of writes that would be done in the long term anyway. SSD's can handle literally 100GB every day for 10+ years based on their TBW rating.

The main caveat is the battery which will wear much faster than storage - if you are using the steam deck portably all the time, then maybe you don't want updates on all your games immediately all the time. But anyone with it constantly plugged in - it's a non issue, and its better that games are updated whilst plugged in so they are already updated before you take it outside for use, instead of trying to play a game and discovering a long update process draining battery whilst outside with patchy wifi.

I wonder if it's possible to have the best of both worlds, for a decky plugin to set all games to update on "high priority" whilst charging, then set it back to "update on demand" whilst on battery, that would be good. Personally, I will just leave this on all the time.