I’ve heard some of you talk about this issue, already. I also heard, that there are a couple of tricks and workarounds to get around this issue. 
Guilty!
It seems to be a thing that Canonical do when they do their build of FF for Ubuntu (note - on Ubuntu, Firefox is STILL updating itself, outside of any “apt upgrade” or updates that Ubuntu is doing, or the user is kicking off from the CLI).
There is NO option in Firefox on Ubuntu to disable auto-updates, however, on MacOS build, (arm64 on M1) - I can disable this “feature” (“Allow Firefox to Check for updates but let you choose to install them”) on Mac, but no Ubuntu - who’d a thunk Mac would be more configurable than Linux? 
My solution was to run Firefox as a portable app as an x86_64 binary from my $HOME…
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In my experience, everything and anything is configurable in Linux. But the mindset of a Unixer or Linuxer is too often so far up in expert expectations, that hardcore users just say “just write a script” or something like that, when a “normal” user probably even wouldn’t know how or where to start.
It’s all relative and I bet if so many Windows users would be knowledgable about PowerShell, just like so many Linuxers are familiar with using Bash, then you could probably configure Windows a lot more, than people think. Sure, Linux goes still a step further, especially with the open source attribute, but still, it’s theoretically possible to hack Windows too, it’s just not as obvious and recommended as on Linux.
So, if it’s configurable on macOS, it probably means you don’t need to fuck around with scripting or hacking the crap out of OS stuff, just to get this work. When a user says it’s configurable on macOS, I expect it’s configurable by a “normal” user, not only by experts.
This is where the misconception about Linux often starts, because the standards of how something is configured on Linux is so much lower, because they count in the hacky, scripty ways, in the same league as the high level GUI configuration options Windows and macOS offers, which is essentially unfair and not a good comparison, at all.
If we compare apples with apples, i.e. configuration options through GUI, between Windows, macOS and Linux, then Linux is almost certainly the biggest loser, especially when you are additionally aware of design consistency and ease of use.
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I found this toggle in my Linux Firefox advanced preferences.
app.update.auto - It can apparently be set to true or false. The default is true.
Or am I out to lunch on this one.