Yes I believe you are understanding correctly.

Big picture everyone is forgetting that BTC is all purely voluntary and open source. You can run a node or not, you can pick the version, you can modify the settings, you can upgrade or not or downgrade, etc.

While defaults do matter, they matter far less in BTC this there are not forced auto updates and everything is open source and volume tart.

I view this all as a bit of a strawman because I’ve never met a single bitcoiner in real life who immediately updates their node when a new Core version comes out. Whether it’s inertia or caution people are generally slow to update, if at all.