I use an old Win7 laptop that will not update. I tried when Win10 was available free and updates fail. It is too old for Win11 hardware requirements. When it was updating, it would always re-write the MBR. I have Linux installed and that would keep me from accessing it until I manually re-wrote the MBR to access those partitions. It has been awhile but I think I wrote protected the MBR and when update fails to write it, it would fail. If Windows still writes the MBR (GPT now) and you write protect the GPT, maybe updates would fail?
On my Desktop, it came with 10 then oneday, it was 11. I think I had turned off auto updates but it did anyway. Maybe it asked and wife clicked yes? I do not have Linux loaded on it. Just tried and no Internet Explorer (ie) found on the Windows 11 machine. I know it was here at one time.