I tend to stay 1-2 years behind. But that hasn’t been an option on new hardware since at least the early OS X days, if not maybe Classic MacOS.
Wikipedia shows the exact version number of the latest releases for each.
To be honest, I’m probably not going to upgrade again at all until the new MBPs seem stable enough for me to buy. Nothing in Big Sur or Monterey seems compelling enough, apart from M1 support and access to iOS apps, for me to risk the disruption.
Now, if I were to update my hardware that won’t be an option.
I will probably soon-ish update to MacOS 11 "Big Sur" (released November 2020), but not yet the just-released MacOS 12 "Monterey".
On new hardware released with Big Sur? To be clear, what I was saying is not an option is “downgrading” new hardware to an older major version than the one it was released with.