There are no changes needed on application code side.

What definition of maintained are you using?

If they're doing security patches and bug fixes it's a maintained codebase.

We're using the definition a few notches upthread: "Dear manager, for the next weeks/sprint the team needs X days to upgrade the software to version x.x.x otherwise it will stop working"

As opposed to:

2011: deploy website, turn on windows update

2011-2019: lead life as normal

2019: website is up and running, serving webpages, and not part of a botnet.

That's reality today, and if it helps to refer to it as "maintained", that's fine. The point is that it's preferable to the alternative.

I think that the parent commenter is referencing node 4.3 being past EOL and being unmaintained software and therefore unfit for prod, unlike the ms stack which is receiving patches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework_version_history begs to differ.

node, not .net

I was referring to comments that MS is good at backwards compatibility and “if you write application, it will run forever” and I pointed out that MS also breaks backward compatibility what regards languages.

Installing Security patches for a ruby stack takes a full code coverage test suite, days of planning and even more to update code for breaking changes.

Installing security patches for a Microsoft stack requires turning on windows update.

There's a BIG difference. Once you write your msft stack app, is done. Microsoft apps written decades ago still work today with no code changes.

That's not true. Try running anything with VisualFoxPro. There are tons of programs that ran on XP and 7 and don't on 10.