Yeah this was my thought as well. If you’re paid to maintain software you have to actually do the work to keep up to date on its dependencies—that’s the job! We’ve seen the alternative play out countless times, GitHub forking Rails 2.3 and maintaining it for years and absorbing more and more tech debt for years until they bit the bullet and upgraded back to mainline Rails.

Sure I’m getting old and it sometimes feels tiresome that software is a treadmill, but hey, it’s job security! And more importantly, change opens space for improvement, which feels good even if it doesn’t always live up to the promise.