Of course, it’s possible that the windows update was a factor, when combined with other conditions.
When it then completely falls apart on reboot, they spend several hours trying to fix it and completely forget the "early warning signs" that motivated them to reboot in the first place.
I've think the same applies to updates. I know the time I'm most likely to think about installing updates is when my computer is playing up.
If I reboot it and it starts working again, then I haven't fixed it at all.
Whatever the initial problem was is likely to still present after reboot -- and it will tend will pop up again later even if things temporarily seem to be working OK.
You only know this after the reboot. Reboot to fix the issue and if it comes back then you know you have to dig deeper. Why sink hours of effort into fixing a random bit flip? I'll take the opposite position and say that especially for consumer devices most issues are caused by some random event resulting in a soft error. They're very common and if they happen you don't "troubleshoot" that.
Say you have a system that has been online for 5 years continuously until a power outage knocks it out. When power is restored, the system doesn't boot to a working system. How far back do you have to go to in your backups to find a known good system? And this isn't just about hardware failure, it's an issue of configuration changes, too.