I am fully aware that widget can be used everywhere
Regarding the What's New page:
Do you think the majority of users does keep that page open, especially on mobile where working with multiple tabs/windows is even more convoluted than on dektop?
Because if they don't, and I would expect most users simply access this page to follow a link to content in the same tab/window, it does not seem to make any sense to me to implement refreshing on that page if time on page is only a few seconds anyway.
What would happen if a user want's to follow a link and just in that moment a refresh kicks in and the link is gone/scrolled down/etc., wouldn't that be annoying/bad experience?
To avoid that it would probably require kinda complex heuristics to attempt to predict navigation attempts and postpone updates if you want to have page parts updated automatically.
Just showing some kind of indicator that new content is available (which is what many news sites are doing) might be less problematic.