I have been an Arch user for years now and anytime I touch a debian based distro it is such a headache: weird patched packages that don't compile anything past or present, insta dependency hell with PPAs, package names of 200 characters because apt doesn't have a good way to represent metadata... It made me a strong believer that trying to fight the bit rot and stick to the old stuff is counterproductive: a consistent head based development with a good community fixing bugs super quickly results in less hours of work fighting the paleolithic era dependencies, safer (as security fixes are faster to get in, packages are foreign to hackers and constantly changing etc), easier to find documentation as you don't need to dig into history to find which option existed or not, recent stuff is also easier to support for the developers of the various packages as it is fresh in their minds. Another point is to look at it from a tech debt lens: either you fix your stuff to work with current deps now or you just accumulate tech debt for the next engineer to fix in a way larger and combining a mountain of breakages in the future that of course IT and SREs will never want to do until the 15y old software is a disaster of security issues...