Safe to close laptop during restart?

This is an embarrassing question, that I'd think I could google a definitive answer for, but I can't:

Is it safe to close a laptop (in my case, an HP Probook 450 G5) while it's restarting?

The background:

It's been more than 15 years since I used a laptop extensively, but I got one that I keep at my office and use for my primary computer there.

I like to restart at the end of the day, so my computer is ready to go, fresh, the next day. This is easy with a desktop, but a laptop seems more "vulnerable" just sitting there open, so my preference is to close it.

Two days ago, I restarted it, closed it, then opened it immediately to see what was happening, and the shutdown/restart sequence was continuing, so I closed it.

When I got to work the next day, it appeared that I had to start it from scratch. Then the display was wrong, and could only be set to 1024x768, or 800x600. I eventually looked at Device Manager, there was a yellow caution triangle over my display, and a check for drivers found and downloaded and installed an updated one, which fixed the display. Cannot imagine how a month-old laptop would have had this problem, so I'm blaming it on my closing the laptop during restart.

So in addition to the initial question, I would also wonder:

1. When is the optimal time to close a laptop?
2. If a laptop is closed when not in use, when/how does it automatically get Windows updates?

When I was a Mac person Apple bragged about how you don't need to restart. That you can simply let your PC sleep. Mac and PC people used to brag about uptime. "Why I haven't had to restart in months!" I cannot express in words how asinine this is.

You have the right instinct: why not refresh your unit once a day? I like that. My only comment in on your execution of the idea. I wouldn't restart at the end of each day. I'd shutdown entirely a night and boot fresh in the morning.

I've owned Asus laptops and have found 'sleeping' at night isn't wise. Sometimes the PC awakes itself (while cloesd) and heats itself up (inside its case) and wears down the battery. I don't trust 'sleep' when the unit is closed... unless you know you'll be coming back shortly.

Another thing is RAM. The longer you have the unit on the more tied up it gets. I've noticed my PCs get 'buggy' and 'slow' once Resource Monitor reports that all the actual and standby RAM has been tied up. A reboot fixes that fast.

I've been using a laptop as my primary business machine for about a decade. Once SSDs became the norm, I stopped using sleep or hibernate. At the end of my day, I just shut the laptop down. In the morning, I power it back on.

Bree said:

I've hardly ever found a situation where a restart was necessary. Most of the time it has no noticeable benefit.

I used to believe this until I closely spied my RAM. Mac, PC, phone -- it doesn't matter what type of device. When strange hinky things start happening I go check the RAM usage.

In Win10 I check RESOURCE MONITOR. If it shows the green bar eating up half the ram and the blue bar eating up the rest, I promise you things are gummed up. I know, I know, that standby RAM is not supposed to be a problem --

-- but the moment you reboot it shrinks and hinky stinkiness disappears.

Thanks to SSD it's painless to reboot.