Rivian consistently ships a lot of new features and improvements, you can see the changelogs here [1]. I think you can pretty fairly critique a lot of them with: They are just solving a problem that they created by making it too techy, or they are shipping stuff they should have completed before releasing the product. I do think its hard to argue that the updates aren't adding anything of value though. There's convenience stuff like pet mode or bird's eye camera view that were added after release, but there are also things like new driving modes (soft sand and snow) or improved DC charging curves and smarter battery conditioning that legitimately improve the quality of the product as a vehicle.

> Edit: Also, why the heck isn't the entertainment system completely air gapped from the software running the car?

As for this, the entertainment system can control basically every feature of the car and is often the primary or only way to accomplish certain things. Even in much much dumber cars the infotainment is still part of the CAN bus and is able to interact with the rest of the vehicle.

https://rivian.software/category/public/

You may not have a say in the matter. Most cars are on some kind of IoT private network with their own cell modems and if the manufacturer decides to push an update there isn't much you can do about it short of ripping out the cell modem. Which may well have unpredictable consequences.