There are official patches on the one hand and development builds on the other. Official patches get here, and on Galaxy with little delay, while the updating of the DRM-free installers can lag days or weeks behind, and they usually just provide new installers, no patch files, so you have to download the whole package again. Development builds are only available on Steam (and Beamdog?), and any changes contained within them will reach GOG only once an official patches comes out. While there's a rather steady work on development builds, the time between the releases of official patches can vary greatly. It was over a year one time, so GOG users were missing out on the changes of several development builds and the GOG version was over one year behind the Steam version. This year they were a bit quicker to release official patches, but noone can say when the current updates to the Steam version will come to GOG. Could be days or weeks from now, could just as well be another year ...
Steam users being the beta tester is a nice idea in theory, but from what I can tell, it doesn't seem like the official patches have been any more stable than the development builds, so basically GOG users just skip a few of times of having to adapt to a new version, nothing more, nothing less. On Steam, I believe you can opt in or out of development builds though and revert to a previous version if something doesn't work in the new one.
Post edited August 11, 2020 by Leroux