I’ve been thinking about this for a while as well, and my opinion is that this makes sense for some communities but not all. Some communities treat their customizations/themes as a fundamental part of the site’s identity and they would really want to know if there are problems with their customizations when their site is deployed, and other communities use a vanilla Discourse install with a few customizations/component sprinkled on top and they could easily live a few days without them.
Maybe the Auto update when Discourse is updated checkbox should off by default when installing a new theme/component? It’s currently on by default and I think it should be off by default, but this needs a wider discussion…
No, the code snippet above (the 2nd line in particular) disables auto-update-on-deploy for all themes/components that are currently installed, so it should fix any builds that are broken due to themes auto-update including JS/CSS errors. The howto should only include the 2nd line.