Is this partly because there is no (or very little) commercial support for FreeBSD and therefore nobody is all that interested in the boring bits like long-term

Is this partly because there is no (or very little) commercial support for FreeBSD and therefore nobody is all that interested in the boring bits like long-term stability releases such as the 5 year release, 5 years of support suggestion in that thread? The volunteers want to do new and interesting things. They don't want to backport fixes for 5 year old bugs anymore when most likely the subsystem that contained that bug has already been replaced in current anyway, so "what's the point?". And if nobody is being paid to do it, if there's nobody _to pay_ to do it, then nobody is going to do it. This has always been the problem with FreeBSD. Despite some great technology the operating system itself has mostly fallen by the wayside in the grand scheme of things. There's way too much FreeBSD "religion" in that community IMO.