BSOD tended to be more in those halcyon days of a very diverse and disparate OEM ecosystem ... similar to what we have with Android nowadays. But the Dells of the world are pretty solid with both stability and support these days. This is of course not to mention the first party stuff (surface et al).
Bloatware ... this was another thing that was exacerbated by the runaway OEM ecosystem. It was the wild west, and they loaded anything and everything on that hardware. Things are a lot more streamlined these days IMO.
As for updates ... with the latest windows, you can schedule when the update happens. So just tell your PC to update when you're sleeping when the notification pops up. Updates will always be a thing, but this makes it easy to work around.
And coming from a mac background, make sure you take a look at WSL (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about)