Have you ever tried to install the latest Node.js and discovered your glibc.so is too old? It's a major impediment and just plain sucks, especially for open source.
Apt-get dist upgrade is really not hard. Learn it, do it.
Society & world has a necessity to not anchor itself to a distant past. In general I believe free software is moving at a bit more incremental pace, with some noticeable new innovation sprinkled in. But a 4.15 kernel from 2018 really is from a before time, before things started settling down. I have no respect for preserving those systems. Anchoring ourselves to the past is antithetical to open source's strengths.
I moved from Debian to Arch for my main home server because I was fed up with reinstalling between versions. Now I think you can upgrade in place.
I will be back to Debian at some point because Arch requires me to remember to update. It works great but since I have everything on docker it depends not make much sense to be bleeding edge
When did Debian require a reinstall between versions? I've been upgrading in place since around 1996. In those early years, sometimes upgrades had rough spots but that hasn't been the case for at least a couple decades.
I came back to Debian when it was 7 or 8 and installed it 6 months before the next release.
The upgrade notes made it very clear that in place upgrades are an abomination and that I will burn in hell if I do that. Or something like that.
So I reinstalled.
And took a Leo of faith in the next version by using "stable" as the distribution, apt dist-upgrade and all. It worked !
Maybe the alarming messages are now gone, good thing. I will be switching from arch to debian soon and stay there for ever.
There's no OS in the world which has both of "requires no maintenance" and "receives all upgrades forever".