If someone is running even important tasks that must not be interrupted, much less critical infrastructure like this, on consumer versions of Windows they're absolute idiots and should never be trusted with those sorts of decisions again.
If one insists on using Windows for uninterruptible tasks they should be using a server edition.
That said I'd always recommend
> Recently heard about an Antarctic base that lost heating for 36 hears after a Windows Update triggered a several GB download over the base's modem downlink.
That seems implausible, or at least to have been miscommunicated. The download and install phases are separate, so nothing would have gone down until the download completed. If the heating system required constant communication and went down due to not enough bandwidth being left over that's obviously a very poor design in general, especially in Antarctica. Even if that were somehow the case, it wouldn't take 36 hours for their network team to block/throttle the update traffic to let it work again.