I think there is and should be a middle ground between "cutting edge" and "never update". You should certainly lock semvar versions (I don't mean lock to major

I think there is and should be a middle ground between "cutting edge" and "never update". You should certainly lock semvar versions (I don't mean lock to major, I mean 100% lock to a specific version) but you should routinely audit and update. I've worked on both ends and they are honestly both terrible. If you don't update fast enough, you build up kludge where it becomes difficult to get onto LTS. If you update too fast, you are constantly putting out fires with everything being in scope as a possible problem. I think every 6 months is fast enough without having it be breaking changes. It gives the version time to mature while you continue working on features. It's a lot easier to work off a stable platform where most of the time you can ignore pre-existing dependencies having breaking issues. In software engineering, the goal is to solve problems not create them and I think a lot of engineers, especially the more junior, have their head too far into "must have best-i-est system evur w/ latest features" rather than "stable platform to solve problems from".