I figured out that it just drops you into a root shell, which is a bad thing.

You should try to never login as root. It's just bad security hygiene.

I run sudo apt update, put in my password, thenonce my repos are updated, I run sudo apt upgrade. Password only has to be input once, unless I get busy and forget to do the upgrade command, in which case I haven't left a root shell unattended for however long it took me to realize that I left the shell open.

That way if someone else comes along and tries to do stuff, they only have the limited privilege level that my user does.