It can happen. There are a bunch of bots that do regression tests, Fedora's Rawhide provides daily debug builds of the kernel with merges in-between the rc's, s

It can happen. There are a bunch of bots that do regression tests, Fedora's Rawhide provides daily debug builds of the kernel with merges in-between the rc's, so there are are some real humans also using the kernel through its development. If you check the 4.11.1 changelog as an example you can see the kinds of things that can crop up. Fedora current releases tend to rebase around x.y.2. So you could use that as a way to weigh your kernel conservatism.