I think the new UPDATE implementation is great, however its impact is limited. As a heavy CH user, our typical use case is inserting rows with some columns are missing, then backfill these columns later on (and I've seen such pattern in many places). In my previous company (big Chinese tech), we developed a customized solution for ingesting partial columns (that's long time ago when FINAL is still a pita). Our current solution is using aggregating merge tree with anyLast and nullable columns. UPDATE == INSERT and that's it. Imagine doing it with millions of UPDATE queries, that'll be nightmare.