As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.
I’ve had small Debian servers such as a RaspPi or a NUC that I’ve never updated after the initial setup and they were still working perfectly when I finally turned them off to move. If you don’t want to update a Linux system, don’t. Maybe setup auto security updates if it’s going to be exposed to the raw internet and running some open servers.