Improving a console regularly is a bad thing.

It just like psv and psp stability update it only patch any exploits to avoid hack

I dont mind. My ps3 froze on me several times in the early days. With each update it become less regular and I dont force shutdown my ps3 in more than a year, so changes and improves were made and I don't mind the few minutes here and there...
Ps4 is way better because some games froze but the OS never freezes, and the updates are one minute things, awesome thing...

They are really annoying.

 I like it when my old dog learned new tricks.  I like it on my PC, phone, TV, and gaming devices.  As long as it doesn't stop me from playing a game when I'm ready to play (like the PlayStation di las gen and the Xbox one did when I got ryse) I like knowing that my experience is constantly improving.  

I also think older hardware would have benefited greatly from updates. We just didn't have the option until now.

I don't really mind them. New features are a good thing after all, and I like that a console can evolve over time and tweak the experience to make it better for users. It depends on how each console handles the update process though. I remember PS3 was really annoying because I would boot the console and be prompted to download a new update quite often. Newer consoles like the 3DS, Wii U, XB1, & PS4 all download them while in standby which makes the process a lot less annoying.

While I'm not too bothered by them, I do sometimes think fondly back to a time when you put in the game and pressed the button and just fucking played the damn thing.

They are less of a nuisance now than last gen, at least on ps4.
My WiiU had an update today, took 10 minutes to install, never told me what it updated, but it made sure to wait for me to press OK before starting to update and again to press OK before restarting. Just do it, no choice anyway.
At least they all download in the background now, no more waiting for that part.

It's a necessary inconvenience nowadays. Consoles have become to complex to wait until the OS is ready before releasing, thus all the extra promised (including previous gen) functionality comes later. Then people grow to expect new features 4 times a year so you got to keep going. It's the new thing, update wars.

Updates are nice. They make your system operate better than it used to. They are rarely annoying. I don't ever really have to update anything because of autoupdate features. Whenever I do have to do something manually, which is pretty rare, it never slows me down for more than 5 minutes.