I've had it happen three times in the last ~1 year each time killing some running process that I kept my pc on for. IIRC it were robocopy backups twice and once during deep sky photography.
I get why they force updates, but resarting is a bit too much for me. Although I understand why they do it, there's so many people just never shutting their systems down and Windows apparently just needs to reboot a lot for updates.
If you haven't noticed it on your machines, it probably is because you keep them updated and restart them regularly (or disabled the "feature" somewhere).
Mint with Cinnamon is very Windows like from the UI. You probably won't need to touch the terminal for running steam games - there's a GUI for pretty much anything a normal user would need.