In my experience, it is quite an exaggeration to claim that "most" post-GA 8.0 features or enhancements are buggy, especially in the general case. Yes, some of them may have edge-case bugs or performance issues, but typically only affecting some users with very specific environmental or workload situations.

Operators must test before upgrading. Luckily some third-party software makes this easier, e.g. Percona's pt-upgrade or ProxySQL's mirroring feature.

I'll state again unambiguously, I'm not personally fond of 8.0's release policy of rolling out new features post-GA. But I view it as an annoyance, and at least one with some upsides (not having to wait 2 years for a massive feature dump all at once) rather than being uniformly negative or "pretty scary". Personally I was careful about testing point release upgrades before 8.0, and I'm still careful about it now.