Windows and MacOS probably are trying to make sure the upgrades don't fail using a lot of brute force. Linux distros are more "if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces".
Contrast with Mac and Win, which are essentially black boxes that only the company's developers understand (if we're lucky).
It's been more than a decade since I used Win or Mac for anything important but back then the standard advice before any major upgrade was "make a backup" because these had a reasonable chance of putting your system into a state that required a reinstall.
They sure do, and I cannot remember the last time my Arch Linux would have broken because of an upgrade. While the packaging systems of Linux distributions are pretty damned good, I believe their stability is more due to great individual efforts of the package developers than any systematic design principle. Also the stability of critical upstream packages has improved greatly.
NixOS's stability derives more from systematic design, but perhaps ironically, NixOS is the only Linux distro I remember having soft bricked in the last 5 years by running an upgrade.
I don't know, that sounds very sloppy if true and not something I'd expect from professional OSes developed by huge companies.
I remember long time ago (maybe back in the xp/vista days) when my Windows installation broke when we had a power outage during my upgrade. Haven't happened lately, but searching online I can see bunch of people having the same problem with latest Windows versions and macOS as well, requiring a reinstall to fix.
One of the things Windows will do is first lay out the work to revert all changes in that happens (across potentially thousands of files). It also need to flush them to disk (very slow, even on SSD) and then perform in a manner that would survive all sorts of failures.
That is pretty expensive.
Macs afaik just replace the whole OS on every upgrade. Takes some time but tends to be kinda atomic without requiring complexity.