How to Temporarily Disable DCAgent Automatic Updates?

TL;DR: Two questions - but I only need one answered:

How to temporarily disable the autoupdate feature in the DCAgent?
How to manually trigger the agent to self-update and how can we confirm that self-update process has completed?

Note

Before I dive into the explanation, I feel it is important to highlight the following:

We understand that it "is always recommended to upgrade your Desktop Central agents to match with the Desktop Central server version for smoother functionality." We are trying to do this today, but we're never notified (a) that a new agent will be released soon and (b) when a new agent is/has been released. As a result, shortly after a new agent is released, we run into this problem which breaks all of the machines that are being imaged causing us to have to restart the imaging process. It's a big disruption.
We are cloud first organization with no on-prem Active Directory (AD) infrastructure. Because of this, we can't rely on any OU-based deployments tied to the SOM policy. If there's some integration with Azure AD then we're interested in learning more about it but as far as I know this doesn't exist.
We are in need of a fully automated solution, not something that requires one to log into the management console to switch SOM policies or do anything like that.

Explanation

During our machine build/imaging process, which is based on the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), we install the Endpoint Central Agent on the machine. Some amount of time after the agent is installed, a built-in self-update mechanism kicks in to update the Endpoint Central Agent. While we appreciate this functionality in general, especially for machines that have been deployed, this autoupdate process breaks our machine build/imaging process.

Our investigation confirmed that when the Endpoint Central Agent runs the autoupdate process, it runs an MSI-based install in the background to perform said update. Under normal circumstances this is fine. However, when this automated process happens during the machine build/imaging process, it causes all of our other MSI-based installs to fail because those installs detect that there's another installation happening and only one MSI can be executed at once.

This same question was raised over 4 years ago here: Stop agent temporary from autoupgrading and starting software update scan after installation (manageengine.com)

Surely that's plenty of time to implement a solution.