Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.