Are Windows 10 monthly updates too large?

I keep a laptop with Windows 10 (upgraded from Windows 7) out in the country at my mother-in-law’s house, and only had a chance in the evening of Sunday Nov. 13 to run Windows Update (when much of the load on Microsoft’s servers should have been over). It found several updates, among them, the “Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 (KB3200970).”
It started to download this large (476 MB) update and got to the 50% mark when it basically got stuck. (Internet downloads there can sometimes be rather slow). After waiting for an hour for it to complete, I rebooted the PC and tried again. This time it got to 71% before getting stuck again. It appeared that the Windows Update server had twice timed-out on me.
Looking for problems with this update in the Internet, I found a link to it in the Microsoft Update Calalog, downloaded the update from there (it took 10 minutes), and successfully applied it using the standalone version of Windows Update.
This experience in my opinion supports my belief that having large (service-pack size) updates to Windows 10, e.g. the Autumn Update, which require equally large fixes to correct, is the wrong way to go, and that it would be better to chop such a large upgrade into smaller, and more digestible, e.g. monthly, updates.