Windows 7 never went away
and Linux is actually worse in this regard.
Well 7 will be going away. MS is going to stop updating it shortly... and running any version of windows that hasn't had security updates for any time frame is a bad idea.
Curious how you feel Linux is worse in this regard though? You can run anything from 1 to infinity parts under Linux up to the user. As for updates Linux uses a proper inode setup and simply downloads the updates and changes the inode addresses instantly recovering the space from the previous files locations. Its why updates take seconds to install instead of hours. So as long as you have the space to download an update in Linux you are golden. I guess if you did really have massive amounts of updates to do you may have to do them one package at a time... but ya even a rolling release rarely has more then a 1gb of updates to do.