It can be frustrating, but it's almost always worth it in a serious production environment. I have my own anecdote: I have serveral home servers running CentOS

It can be frustrating, but it's almost always worth it in a serious production environment. I have my own anecdote: I have serveral home servers running CentOS 7 (set up nearly 6 years ago). I update all the time and I've had zero issues. Literally nothing has ever broken. My previous servers ran CentOS 6, and were equally reliable. My desktop runs Arch Linux, and gets ever kernel dot release. I've had an unbootable system at least 5 times over the last 5 years, requiring me to boot from a flash drive to downgrade a package, or edit a grub config. As you can imagine, it's bitten me at the worst possible time (when I really don't have time to troubleshoot). I know some people advocate for Arch on the server, but to me that seems crazy. Nothing against Arch. It's great for a desktop, and I knowingly trade off some reliability/stability for the latest stuff. I wouldn't make that trade on a server that hosted important stuff.