I haven’t used a mac for over a decade, but for the decade or so before that it never happened to me once, either on an iBook or MBP. Perhaps something changed in the meantime.

It absolutely isn’t. If a laptop lid is closed, it needs to be sleeping, period. No random updates, no search indexing. I’ve also had this happen after explicitly putting laptops into sleep AND closing the lid. No idea how Apple is the only company able to do this consistently.