I think this is a myth, or at best relative, not all enterprises accept old for stability

Many enterprises want up to date and stable software, and since you are paying for stability, why shouldn't you get fairly recent and stable software

Most companies for example don't consider MS SQL 2016 as less stable than MS SQL 2008 or 2012, most users expect the same level of stability from the latest SQL Server than from earlier version, if not more because it's newer and more advanced, might as well be more stable

I didnt use RedHat in a while, so I dont know how bad the situation is , I hope it is not too bad

Nobody running a thousand of anything uses the first release of $X, whether $X is a database or window manager or kernel or router firmware

SQL Server 2016 may be better than SQL Server 2008, but enterprises aren't deploying it until it has baked a few months, and maybe sp1/sp2/some major rollup ships for all the bugs the suckers find at rollout

Exactly this.

We've hit more than one kernel regression in staging.

I have software that I need to run for about 5 years. It is certified on Red Hat Linux 6 not 7. I'm not unique. Heck, we had to keep copies of IE 6 running up until a year ago for one testing vendor[1]. I, like a lot of others, need stability and paperwork not new.

Frankly, having a lot of new companies adopting a mantra of "move fast, break things" makes me want to 'upgrade' less and less. I need stuff working at Monday at 1PM for the weekly test offering not some oops.

1) deep freeze or virtual machines are your friend.

Better than ever.

With things like Software Collections and IUS you get to run the latest stuff on a rock-solid base. I don't want to upgrade my kernel to get a newer Python or NodeJS release!

https://www.softwarecollections.org/

https://ius.io/

https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg

Software Collections are honking great, I'm actually looking at moving one of my Python 3 apps from Fedora to CentOS purely because it requires a version of Firefox that supports the Java plugin (selenium script that has to use a page with a java applet...) - since RHEL/CentOS stick with ESR releases I'll at least have 18 months to hope the applet goes away.

Ditto this. We run the power grid on RHEL and the latest and greatest features are far down our list of wants. Stability, security, and support; yeah, we'll take those. ;)