Bridges need regular maintenance or they will fail and come crashing down.
this LTS hysteria is completely made-up
it benefits from updates every year, also who uses naked k8s (the hard way?), folks use a distribution with an updater
of course it's more work than simply applying the new charts, but the nice thing about k8s is that you can dump out the stuff from the working one, use k3s/kind/minikube, try the upgrade, and you are as good to go as with a dist-upgrade or similar.