You absolutely need to move from patch to patch and cannot just do a multiple version jump safely. You also need to validate the configs between versions, especially major release updates or you risk breaking. New features and optimizations happen and you also may need to change our update your reverse proxy configuration on update, or modify db table configuration (just puking this from memory as I've had to do it before). I don't know that there's automation for each one of those steps.

Because of that, I run nextcloud in a VM and install it from the binary package. I wrote a shell script that handles downloading, moving the files, updating permissions and copying the old config forward, symlinking and doing the upgrade. Then all I have to do is log in as administrator, check out the admin dashboard and make sure there aren't new things I have to address in the status page. It's a pain, but my nextcloud uses external db and redis and PHP caching so it's not an easy out of the box setup. But it's been solid for a long time once I adopted using this script.