On Saturday, I spent several hours trying to update an M1 MacBook Air from Mac OS Sonoma 14.7.5 to Sequoia 15.4. Each attempt resulted in a kernel panic and an unsuccessful update, including attempts made from Safe Mode and from a bootable installer. Upgrading to 15.4.1 yesterday was successful from normal mode.
After Sequoia 15.4.1 was installed, the “Install macOS updates” setting was indeed turned on for this machine, where it had not been before.