> The only time I’d ever consider an LTS anything at this point is for early-stage startups that just cannot pay that cost. You're touching on the deeper truth

> The only time I’d ever consider an LTS anything at this point is for early-stage startups that just cannot pay that cost. You're touching on the deeper truth here. Ultimately you are forced to touch production all the time for at least security updates. The question is whether you have people on staff who know the system, at all levels of the stack. If you do, then there is only pain by taking the LTS route, because you will have a fundamental divide between the people who need the latest features and the people who know the specific LTS release. But if you have people who treat the lower level like a black box, and nobody on staff knows how it works, then LTS helps you derisk this black box that nobody knows by restricting the updates to security updates only and nothing that is supposed to break existing behavior. Then, when upgrading LTS releases, you treat the LTS upgrade as a project in and of itself (full QA, the whole nine yards) instead of some day-to-day maintenance running on autopilot. Most SaaS stacks run by startups / grow-ups should have people familiar with every level of the stack that they're building on top of. If you don't, build on top of a managed service instead, and be familiar with the managed service's APIs instead.