How do you ensure that updates haven’t broken booting?

It is very irksome to have to reboot due to a hardware issue and then discover that some software change possibly months or years ago broke startup.

I discovered this the hard way with my home server. The boot drive whilst still working wouldn’t come up on boot. It apparently worked in Linux still but it was no longer bootable.

Having to scramble after a power outage to get a bootable Linux image to fix it wasn’t ideal.

No way to have discovered this without a hard power cycle, a soft reset didn’t repro it.

How do y'all handle kernel updates?

I wonder this too but don’t manage it myself.