In practice, this is rarely a problem unless you're a cloud vendor with a DBaaS product; the most common concern there tends to be bugs that cause server crashe

In practice, this is rarely a problem unless you're a cloud vendor with a DBaaS product; the most common concern there tends to be bugs that cause server crashes. But even that is fairly rare, and those platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, etc) generally maintain custom patch sets anyway. As far as I can recall, the vast majority of modern MySQL CVEs have been low severity and/or require the attacker to already be in your private network. For sake of comparison -- does Postgres backport every security patch to every major.minor tree? And aren't HA Postgres upgrades generally more difficult than MySQL ones since logical replication is less widespread in the PG landscape?