I’m on an intel and haven’t noticed a significant CPU usage change in the last few years. I update every year shortly after they up the main number version around fall.
I am in a weird edge case where audio performance is probably dominated by the driver I’m using in order to use some headphone correction software at the system level and/or my audio interface during recording.
By ‘upgraded’, do you just mean downloading the latest updates / staying up to date? I couldn’t imagine not doing that 
I was a user for a few years, did a bunch of patcher-related shit, VFX scripts and whatnot and never had any performance issues. I often used a shitload of plugins, too, often shitty ones that I wrote myself to aid in patcher-specific tasks and I still think it rarely crashed on me, lol.
For Windows / Mac users, I seriously think it’s one of the best out there for so many reasons.