Safety when forced NOT to use Updater

Hard on the heels of a discussion about the Updater, it has just crashed 3 times in succession on an update to dom0: system froze, hard reset required.

This is not uncommon (usually on Fedora updates). I have used dnf in the template as a work around previously, as have others.

This time I updated via the GUI in Qubes Manager. It worked, via dnf update in xterm (or something that looked like it).

However, now I know that Salt is doing something extra with updates via the Updater - but I really don’t understand what - I’m suddenly wary that I have a system that isn’t fully patched.

What do I need to do here?