You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze.
These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it.
Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago.
If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.
These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it.
Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.