I do not recommend unattended upgrades. Every upgrade without any exceptions have the possibility to destroy any working system or your applications. Test and deploy would be wiser.
By the way, what the heck developers do on production systems?
Bear in mind that in small company, developer == dev op == sys op == network manager = testers == toilet cleaner. i.e. they do everything, dev or production.
As regards to unattended upgrades, again in small companies the choice is usually between them or no upgrades (no time for the test/deploy cycle across all platforms in use etc., less frequently used systems get forgotten and so on). As the article points out, its safest just to go for security updates only. If the security update breaks things, then yes, your system is down until you fix it. If a hacker breaches your system, your system is down until you re-deploy it, and then you have to deal with the PR fallout of lost credentials and data etc.
Its only anecdotal, but I've had no problems with unattended security updates on my ubuntu boxes in the 5-ish years. Security breach attempts are a daily occurrence.
It's nice if its not an either/or choice, but for many it is.
If you don't have time to test, you have yet another reason to not automate updates. It's better to run them only when you are around and have some time to fix whatever goes wrong.
By the way, what the heck developers do on production systems?