In mine, it depends.

If your character never really grows or changes in response to anything that happens in their life, probably you don't need any. But, how interesting is that?

Ultimately I'd rather see someone write a basic role and play the hell out of it in a way that makes the game fun for other people and raises the level of RP around them, than see someone write a basic role, not really play it, and provide updates... but that doesn't mean updates aren't potentially valuable.

A lot of the time when we're like "updates?" it's because the character as currently played seems to have meandered a fair bit from the character as described in the role and we're wondering how we got from point A to point B.

Some of the best updates in roles that won this time around involved talking about pretty big turning points in those characters' lives -- how and why they happened, how the character reacted to them. That's a good kind of update -- it tells me about something important that affects your RP. A play by play of every insignificant thing in your life I don't need to read.