I can't claim to be very very experienced, but I learned a lot from this piece. In particular it convinced me to try Common Lisp precisely because it is stable and boring. Common Lisp has allowed me to focus on solving my problems rather than keeping up with language or ecosystem changes. It's nice to be able to read decades-old books and have them still be good, in contrast to the much newer books I have for other languages where those books are already ready for the trash heap.
But I'm the sort of person who shrugs when someone says "this software is not updated anymore, it must be out of date." I say: maybe that's good, cat(1) hasn't been updated much, isn't that good?