Well, yes. Curiously enough, (IIRC) watchtower started out automatically pulling new images when available. Then the maintainers found that approach to be worse than proper orchestration and disabled the pulling. Perhaps it's different now.

My experience with watchtower is that it kept breaking stuff (or maybe just pulling broken images?)

My server was much more stable after it didn’t try to update all the time any more.

I wonder if I can set a minimum timeout.

Watchtower runs the images if they update, but AFAIK it doesn't pull if the base image changes.

Then again, Harbormaster doesn't do that either unless the upstream git repo changes.