Ridiculous

This plugin exists because WordPress and plugins check for new updates every hour, minute, or even every page refresh. This puts a lot of stress on your WordPress host and can create a slow mess of an admin page.

This plugin works so well for our site and has improved our admin loading times substantially. We deactivate the plugin every 4 days to update any needed plugins and in turn, our backend is running incredibly smooth.

4 days is too long to wait to update site plugins, if a plugin has a key security issue which needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

There are valid reasons to use this.

• If you have forked plugins and deploy updates to your site using git deployments. From that approach, you update your plugins and test, then push it out to the production environments. With a large network of sites you can deploy an update to hundreds of sites with one click. This plugin prevents the complications of one of your site owners trying to do updates themselves without first testing for conflicts and other issues.
• You have a cowboy admin that clicks update whenever they see it. If you have any complexities due to site customization, or conflicts between plugins, you can’t let this happen. This Plugin hides all that from that admin so that you can have “ownership” over the plugin updates. Yes you still have to be on top of it, but if multiple people need admin access to work together on a site this helps keep cowboys from making issues.
• Performance

I agree that in many cases this would not be advised for your average site. But it does serve a real purpose for people when they have a lot of hands in the pot, are updating plugins remotely, or have high volume sites with performance concerns. Rate the plugin on how well it works, not based on if you feel you need it. I am currently testing this out and other options for disabling updates because it has become an issue to be solved for one network of sites, and I’m grateful to these developers for putting their solution out here.