drama A few thoughts:
(1) The consensus on this forum (from other threads concerning the question) is that Solus should update the Budige, Gnome, MATE and Plasma ISOs periodically to support new hardware as it comes along. As far as I can tell, there is no consensus, however, on how frequently Solus should update the ISOs. Annual or twice annual updates seem to be the most supported. That said, I suspect almost everyone on the forum believes that it is time for an updated ISO set.
(2) Post-ISO updates are a routine (and necessary) part of installing any distro. The size of the Solus post-ISO updates is currently high (it varies from DE to DE), but not particularly so in comparison to many other distros (in particular rolling-release distros, which update packages frequently).
(3) A number of distros "hide" the post-ISO update process by installing updates during the installation process (which lengthens the installation process but is invisible to the user), but of those that do not, my experience is that it isn't at all unusual for 600-1000 packages to be updated post-installation.
(4) As @murbert pointed out, an updated ISO is not likely to affect anything with "potato" computers, because "won't boot without update" issues are almost always hardware-related, and the hardware in "potato" computers (generally five years old or older) is usually supported by kernels that are much older than the 5.13 kernel (released in July 2021). As a general rule, if the "Live" USB session runs on a computer, the installed ISO from the USB will run on the computer. My personal "potato", a now-defunct Dell Inspiron 11-3180 circa 2017, installed and ran fine on the 4.xx kernel, although (because of the computer's low specs) downloading, installing and updating took a long time.
(5) Because Solus is a curated rolling release, in which almost all packages are updated over the course of a few months, the number of packages installed post-ISO will be high again within a few months after release of any ISO. My experience (if I remember right) is that roughly 500-600 packages updated post-installation within a month or two after the 4.3 ISO was released.
(6) Because you live in an area with slow and expensive internet, I wonder if your friends might be better off with a traditional LTS release because fewer packages update weekly. I run both Solus Budgie and Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS, and I've noticed that Ubuntu Budgie's weekly updates are significantly smaller than Solus Budgie's.
