> Look at the resent story about Linux stable kernels that have had more than 255 minor releases and think how much of a shit show it would have been if they added features too like most developers do.

At least some distribution kernels do new feature backports - mostly to support new hardware on LTS versions (like e.g. Ubuntu did for the Raspberry Pi, see https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3464).