Not saying that companies shouldn't pay for extended support, but many other open source software have LTS releases with multi-year support (e.g. Ubuntu/Debian

Not saying that companies shouldn't pay for extended support, but many other open source software have LTS releases with multi-year support (e.g. Ubuntu/Debian 5 years for LTS releases, and Node.js for 2.5 years.) Additionally, I think one of the major reason for LTS is that K8s (and related software) regularly introduces breaking changes. Out of all the software that we use at work, K8s probably takes the most development time to upgrade.