Currently, following the latest updates are a Sophie's choice. Because if your software is a month old, it may have one or two known vulnerabilities, which may or may not be disclosed, may or may not have a POC, and may or may not be actively exploited in the wild. But if you download and install the latest update, then you may receive mitigations for known exploits, but now you very likely have an unknown number of new zero-day vulnerabilities.

So update decisions could have a calculus like, "it's already working; I don't need any feature updates; I'll stick with the stable version" and then attempting to evaluate each CVE on its merits vs. the mitigations offered in each update. (Of course, the way developers like KeePassXC are fighting with the NVD shows that CVE descriptions can't even be trusted these days.)

I foolishly disabled automatic updates for my consumer-grade WiFi router, and I didn't have a plan for manual updates, so it got pwned. I read a few CVEs and I'm fairly sure I know how it was pwned remotely. Thankfully it didn't seem to be making lateral moves into my computing devices, or acting against me personally, and I was able to disinfect the router and put it back into service. The vulnerabilities that enabled the pwnage were fixed by an update which was released about a month before the pwnage, so if I'd been on automatic updates, I probably would've been safe. And that's what the hackers count on.