I have an Nvidia graphics card, and recently Nvidia started sending popup messages that an updated driver is available and I should update.

I'm a bit paranoid about updating what I consider to be "core" drivers, what if something goes wrong in the middle of the update and I have no video, how could I ever fix it without being able to see what I was doing.

Are these fears total fantasy on my part?

If I am satisfied with my video performance as-is, why should I update?

What should I do?

tnstaafl.

If the vendor provided accelerated driver fails, Windows will fall back to a VGA driver to still give you something onscreen. No need to fear an update for that reason.

Video drivers tend to see improvements once a month. A majority of this is better support for games, and part of it is fixing past crash reports. They also sometimes add new features, such as APIs to allow use of the graphics card for certain computing tasks.

I'd say stop worrying so much about it and just update

Turn off the phone-home feature?

Upgrade.
I mean, I NEVER had any issue with official stable releases of nVidia drivers. I had problems BEFORE upgrades.

I have. They broke mode-switching in the Linux driver, which is based on the Windows code.