When users are used to updates screwing them over generally, it's not a surprise that we start to find people who don't want to update and disregard the security entirely.
iOS doesn't seem to have this problem, reaching "89% of all devices introduced in the last four years use iOS 15"[0].
iOS generally is less at-risk for these botnet issues since any botnet needs to be actively embedded within a popular app-store-installed app, especially if it wants to run expensive background tasks hitting HTTP endpoints. To add, since apps can't JIT, the apps can't RCE a jailbreak that would allow full system compromise, besides if the exploit chain is possible via a WebKit exploit (which is exceedingly rare[1]).
>I certainly don’t worry about any negatives from an iOS update
Really? I always have issues after iOS upgrades, mostly related to iCloud. But I still update ASAP because as soon as a new iOS version is released, the old version causes even more iCloud problems. Apple and the whole iOS ecosystem just doesn't tolerate old versions (which is mostly a good thing but also has some downsides)