The updates don't break things, rather it's the underlying system installation that is already broken such that the update/upgrade makes things even worse. Updates cannot "fix" already broken systems.
Repairing permissions on your Home folder is not out of date even for Catalina. User mistakes or third-party software may alter permissions in the Home folder causing functional problems. These problems can often be repaired by resetting permissions in the Home folder to their default state. This has nothing to do with fsck.
Fsck is merely a filesystem check and repair program. It is what Disk Utility uses. All macOS tools are mostly GUI wrappers around a Unix command, like fsck. You ran it in verbose mode (single-user mode) but did not report results. You simply said there was an fsck problem. Therefore, there is no way to determine what happened or why.
If you got all the way to the point of doing an Erase and Install, then your system was so badly hosed that not even a simple re-install could fix things. You may consider doing these updates/upgrades with some sort of planned order. Here is my suggestion:
- Use Disk Utility to run First Aid on the disk that is being updated.
- Create a bootable backup of the startup disk on an external disk.
- Test the backup to be sure it properly boots the computer.
- If you have already downloaded the installer, then transfer it to the bootable backup. Otherwise, directly download the installer to the bootable backup.
- Reboot the computer from the bootable backup but boot into Safe Mode.
- Open the macOS installer app.
- Change the target disk to the computer's main boot disk. This will not work with updaters. Updaters will have to run from the target disk. However, if you install the update on the backup disk, then you can determine if the update was successful. If it is, then clone the backup to the computer's main boot disk or install the update directly after booting from the main boot disk. If there is a problem, the problem will not affect the computer's main disk, and you lose no down-time.
Here is an alternative to the above:
Installing An Upgrade From Safe Mode
- Disconnect all peripherals connected.
- Reset your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM.
- Restart the computer and at the chime press and hold down the Command and R keys until the Utility Menu appears.
- Select Disk Utility and press the Continue button.
- Then select the indented (usually, Macintosh HD) volume entry from the side list.
- Click on the First Aid button in the toolbar and wait for the Done button to activate. Click on it, then quit Disk Utility.
- Select Restart from the Apple menu. Press and hold down Command-S to start in safe mode. This is slower than a normal startup. Don't panic.
- Now, try installing the update/upgrade, and see if you have normal results.