My pleasure to help!
There are a few ways around this.
- Localhost – You can create a localhost copy of your website and then test the theme updates before you do it on your live website. If the update is fine then you can go ahead and update on your live website. If you are experiencing a ton of errors then you can fiddle around with it on your localhost and then make the changes to your live website to avoid errors.
- Changelog – Themes (and most all plugins) are sort of obligated to create a changelog. The changelog will tell you what changes were made in the update. You can scroll through this to see if anything will affect your child theme.
- Disable Updates – This is not encouraged at all. Although, just to cover all the bases I will include this. You can (if you really want) disable all of your updates. This is not suggested because then you may get security vulnerabilities. Also soon your website will be far outdated to do anything or use any plugin on it. Although, if you are so inclined to do this you can use the Easy Updates Manager plugin (which I have contributed to ?? ) or the Disable All WordPress Updates plugin to disable the updates so you don’t accidentally update them or something.
As for themes being discontinued… There is no complete way to avoid this happening. Although free themes have a way higher chance of being discontinued and not having good support. If you really don’t want this happening then a premium theme by a reliable provider is the best route. I would check out the commercial themes section. https://www.ads-software.com/themes/commercial/
