I never understand these complaints about homebrew. Of course, that's because I set

  export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1

in my zshnev so long ago that I forgot about it, and just enjoyed a great product from a great community.

Is it a bad default? Sure, probably, spooky-action-at-a-distance is not great. But it's just a default, if you don't like it, change it, one line of shell config is simpler switching distros.