Firmware 5.1.45 rolling out for Essentials over Thread - big batch update or one at a time?

I'm in the canary camp, but only because I got burned once. Updated all twelve of my Essentials bulbs plus the strip under the cabinets in one go last spring and two of the bulbs in the living room started dropping off the mesh every couple of days. Had to pull them out and re-add them, wich was a pain since the strip was alredy mounted and tucked behind trim. Now I do one bulb in the stairwell, wait three or four days, then batch the rest if nothing acts up. The changelog situation bugs me too. I've never found proper release notes for these, just vague mentions in the app like 'stability improvements.' My theory is most of these drops are Thread radio tweaks and small bug fixes, so the risk is low, but that's a guess, not knowledge.

On the rollback question, my expirience is you're mostly stuck. I've never seen a way to go back a version, so if a build is bad for your setup you're waiting on the next one. That's the real reason I test first. One hallway bulb for a couple of days costs me almost nothing. If it flickers, forgets its scene, or gets laggy on the dimming slider, I just leave the rest alone til the next drop shows up.

I used to do the one-bulb trial thing but I gave up on it after a summer of mixed versions. My bedroom bulb sat on an older build for weeks while the rest updated, and scenes that involved that room kept acting strange, dimming at the wrong level and dropping off when the rest of the house was fine. Took me ages to figure out the version mismatch was the culprit, not the new firmware itself.

Now I wait a couple of weeks after a drop like this one, skim through any chatter here to see if people are reporting problems, and then do the whole lot in one evening while I'm home. If something breaks during an update I'd rather be there watching it happen than have a single canary bulb fail quietly while I'm at work. The other thing that changed my thinking is that there's no rollback anyway. If 5.1.45 is bad, the hallway test bulb is just as stuck as the rest woud have been, so the cautious approach only buys you information, not an escape hatch. And since these are Matter bulbs on my own thread network, a bad actor bulb can be factory reset and re-added without touching anything else, which is annoying but not a disaster. Missing changelogs still bugs me though. A short list of fixes would remove most of the guesswork.

I stagger mine by room, mostly because I got curious one evening and watched the update process closely, and the whole mesh seems to hiccup for a few minutes while each device reboots and rejoins. That's prolly harmless, but with a dozen devices updating at once it felt like asking for a bad evening. One thing that helps me is that the app shows the exact firmware version on each device's detail page, so I keep a note in my phone of what's on what build. Makes diagnosing a misbehaving room much faster. Does anyone know if 5.1.45 is rolling out in phases, or did everyone get offered it the same day?

Agree with staggering by room, the mesh really does get flaky for a bit during each update. I noticed it on mine last month when a couple of battery sensors threw low-signal warnings right as the nearby bulbs were rebooting, then everything settled down on its own.

One thing I'd add to the wait-and-see approach: give it a full day before judging. After my last update the hallway bulb dimmed weird for an evening, I figured it was a bad build, but by the next morning it was behaving like normal. Might have just been re-adjusting after the rejoin.