homebrew is non-commercial and updates on-run, rather than in the background, but frankly yes

if they had a commercial offering I think they have the brand trust to make this work

They have that trust because all the software installed by homebrew is open source.

Not necessarily all open source, homebrew-cask has been merged into brew and you have e.g. Jetbrains IDEs and Zoom available.

Personally I use homebrew-cask to manage almost all applications and their updates, turning auto-updating off in almost all apps. That way I am in control and can update when it is convenient, know if an update broke something, etc.

Edit, using:

- https://github.com/buo/homebrew-cask-upgrade

- https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle