The good news is that the only time a Child Theme is required, is if you are making (or plan to make) changes to the actual files that drive the theme.
If all of your changes to the theme have been restricted to the WordPress Customizer or some other Options Panel within the WordPress admin, then you don’t need to worry about a Child Theme (which sounds like the case for you, from what you described).
Likewise, applying updates to the theme through the WordPress Updates functionality should not break things either (with one potential caveat – if the theme author makes some mistakes).
If you’re suddenly having issues with your site look and feel in the event of the latter situation (just making config changes via the WP admin tools), then the likelihood is that the issue is one of the following:
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The theme creator made some mistakes with their latest theme update(s), which is causing the issues. If this is the case, you should reach out to the theme owner and see if they can provide help. Where you do that will depend on where you got the theme (e.g. WordPress.org vs. some purchased / premium theme site).
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You have one or more plugins on your site that are not working correctly, or that are conflicting with your theme. This can happen if a plugin in question was written by someone who doesn’t understand how to write their code in such a way that it will not conflict with other items. You can quickly test this by disabling your plugins (either all of them at once, or one at a time – which takes longer), and see if your theme continues to be broken.
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Lastly, as one other poster mentioned, it is possible that your WordPress site has been hacked or otherwise maliciously modified – which could break the theme’s ability to handle configuration changes. If you think this might be the case, then the first step is to make a backup of your website, and I’d suggest downloading the backup to your local computer, just to be safe. You can use a tool like UpdraftPlus (free version available in WordPress Plugins) or something similar to create the backup, if your hosting provider doesn’t already provide you a way to do that.
Then I’d suggest you do a quick security scan of your website using Sucuri SiteCheck (https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/), to see if there’s any obvious signs of site abuse. After that, I’d also suggest looking into a security plugin, to help protect your site from future abuse (e.g. You can search WordPress Plugins for Wordfence, iThemes Security, or something else similar – there are plenty of options).
FWIW,
twykr.