Backports are very rarely provided by the community for older plugin/module versions. Backporting by hand, on your site, makes technical debt worse. Now, not o

Backports are very rarely provided by the community for older plugin/module versions. Backporting by hand, on your site, makes technical debt worse. Now, not only are you not up to date with the community code, but you've got extra custom code that will have to be integrated or torn out to catch up. In terms of competencies: if a team is struggling to integrate and deploy community-provided code, how good a job are they likely to do writing, testing, and deploying custom code? Especially in a hurry. That's what I mean by flexing the muscle. A team that updates their site's code frequently is going to be a team that understands their application better, has more complete test coverage, and deploys with more confidence. And if custom code is required (like a backport), they're going to be better equipped for that too.