Why do you need to “upgrade your stuff” every 2-3 years?
Keeping your infrastructure/code somehow uptodate ensures: - each time you have to upgrade, this is not a big deal - you have less breaking changes at each iteration, thus less work to do - when you must upgrade for some reasons, the step is, again, not so big - you are sure you own the infrastructure. That current people owns it (versus people who left the company 8 years ago) - you benefits from innovation (yes, there is) and/or performance improvements (yes, there is)
Keeping your stuff rotting in a dark room brings nothing good
I'd much rather stand up a replacement system adjacent to the current one, and then switch over, than run the headache of debugging breaking changes every single release.
To me, this is the difference between an update and an upgrade. An update just fixes things that are broken. And upgrade adds/removes/changes features from how they were before.
I'm all for keeping things up to date. And software vendors should support that as much as possible. But forcing me to deal with a new set of challenges every few weeks is ridiculous.
This idea of rapid releases with continuous development is great when that's the fundamental point of the product. But stability is a feature too, and a far more important one in my opinion. I'd much rather a stable platform to build upon, than a rickety one that keeps changing shape every other week that I need to figure out what changed and how that impacts my system, because it means I can spend all of my time _using_ the platform rather than fixing it.
This is why bleeding edge releases exist. For people who want the latest and greatest, and are willing to deal with the instability issues and want to help find and squash bugs. For the rest of us, we just want to use the system, not help develop it. Give me a stable system, ship me bug fixes that don't fundamentally break how anything works, and let me focus on my specific task. If that costs money, so be it, but I don't want to have to take one day per week running updates to find something else is broken and have to debug and fix it. That's not what I'm here to do.
And as for cleaning the house - we always have the option of hiring a cleaner. That costs us money, but they keep the house cleanliness stable whilst we focus on something else to make enough money to cover the cleaner's cost plus some profit.
And also because, for the others, you have to migrate everybody from the "old" to the "new"; Large project, low value, nobody cares, "just to your job and don't bother us with your shit"
Perhaps this is a side effect of dealing with software development ecosystems with huge dependency trees?
There's a lot of software not like that at all. No dependencies. No internet connection. No multi kilobyte lock files detailing long lists of continual software churn and bug fixes.
There is an argument for staying on the latest stable version.
I think interface names changed like at least 2 times in the last 4 releases.
What you would do for anything important is build a new separate system and then migrate to that once it is working. You can then migrate back if you discover issues too.
OS is not a physical house with life waste.
Rest of your message doesn’t make any sense for majority of industry. For anything dealing with manufacturing stability is much more important that marginal performance gains. Any downtime is losing money.