In my experience doing the frequent small upgrade steps is better. It's valuable to know what the update actually does because the list of changes is so small. At the same time it's possible that small updates degrade the system stability so slowly that it's difficult to notice at first.

Right now I'm running Fedora on my old laptop and I was positively surprised in how many details it got better in terms of user-friendliness and predictable behaviour in general, I hope it'll break the curse of "stable" distros constantly falling apart on my PCs.