Yup. At my last company, Kubernetes was the only place where software was not 2+ years behind upstream because of this and I appreciate it a lot. And its API deprecation policy [1] made upgrade not so painful (if upgrades frequently break your stuff, check if your infra people really understand this policy, and your software vendors are compliant).

1. https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-p...