This sounds like the experience my kids had when they got their XBox One last Christmas. It took literally 2 hours before we could play anything on it.
Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.
Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.
So we live in the world of ship it broken/incomplete, just so a PM can hit their date, quality of the game be damned.
I prefer Valve Time to make sure things are as quality, complete and correct as possible [1].
The worst part about these 50GB games and 'patches' is that it takes a few days to get it down sometimes with the data capped/throttled ISP 'networks' we have settled for milking us out of transfer, and big games like this really let them hinder your 'network' for a few days, knocking you offline, data/packet loss and more as they think you are doing something malicious with their 'smart' 'network' throttling.
Even with auto-updates turned off, the PS4 will download patches when in rest mode. I used to love renting games at Redbox, but the rise of huge patches makes that impossible. I rented the Modern Warfare remaster thinking it was an old game and would mostly work out of the box. I was shocked to see it try to download a 40 GB patch. I canceled the download and played the game without the patch and returned the game the next day (it's not a remaster; they re-made everything and it stinks). The next day, I turned on my PS4 to see it had downloaded and installed the patch without me. 5% of my data cap, gone.
An aside, I stumbled across https://physicalgames.wordpress.com/ps4-update-sizes/ a few months ago and like to reference it before making any purchases. Fallout 74 is a hard pass for me.
I know you can set it to a mode where it can stay minimally powered on and update itself, but I use it so infrequently why would I waste all that power?
Back in 1985 I got a BBC Micro for Christmas. I turned it on. Beep Boop and I had BASIC in front of me. Anything that doesn't do that magic will get my fist shaking while the onion on my belt wibbles around damn it :)