Definitely not my experience. I install an Ubuntu LTS release and I get 5 years of support with updates that never break anything. No doubt people have issues, but I've never encountered a problem during a security update that was not caused by my own previous mucking around. Rolling releases, on the other hand, are a nightmare for this, and smaller distros never work out of the box in my experience.

If you're saying upgrading between releases causes problems.. well that's true but not how I read the original statement, and not something I particularly care about. Each release is a different product and there's no reason to update until support is dropped on the one you're currently using.