No, this is probably just the result of Apple getting hammered over and over on every release for bugs slipping into the releases and updates.

People were just losing their minds on here over bugs in the 27.2 beta release that hasn't even shipped yet, with wild conspiracy theories about what Apple was doing.

So you wind up with a typical megacorp release process where nothing can happen if it isn't signed off in triplicate and two operators crack open the books with the missile codes and turn the keys at the same time to launch the update.

The result is that shipping a single file for a critical security update takes way too long.