I guess we can’t speak about battle testing in a new release from a “running in production with real user workloads” but if the test suite is properly implemented and has good coverage and exercises many cases and failure modes, it’s possible that a SQLite release is more battle tested on day zero than other software is when it’s been running for months or years. What do you think? A new version presumably still runs through validation before release.

Here's where the asymmetry of security bugs and feature bugs comes into play.

Introducing a buffer overflow in a small unused corner / edge case of the feature set allows an attacker to fully compromise the process, and it's thus a problem affecting a 100% of the users.

Introducing a behavioral bug in the same unused corner / edge case, will affect only a very small number if people (possibly none)

Freezing the software is no assurance of security either. I'll take ongoing maintenance of the quality of sqlite every time personally.

sqlite is known for its massive test coverage with 600x+ test to source ratio [0].

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html