I never know if there's an iOS update because iOS never knows

I have auto-everything turned on now after years of resisting because Apple software is just riddled with bugs. But I finally gave up because support will have you update every time or just wave you off. SO I had the charging bug that has been plaguing my 12 Pro for 2 years happen again last night, and before contacting support (again) decided to see if I was fully up-to-date. It seems 16.2 was released on December 13!

Zero notifications. Not the red circle on the icon for system settings, not anything because I had to go INTO the About section and THEN it seemed to trigger a response and suddenly show an update was available...

Is there any fix for this that doesn't involve me wiping my phone entirely and starting over from scratch and having to spend hours logging back into things and hoping I don't lose data from any apps, etc? From a security standpoint alone this is a real problem I would think Apple would take seriously but the support people I talk to are all like "oh yeah that happens oh well"...