I was with you until the last bit. There are some folks having a lot of success taking apps running on old versions of centos and running them on later version

I was with you until the last bit. There are some folks having a lot of success taking apps running on old versions of centos and running them on later versions, as an example. To elaborate - Some distros / companies are planning it to be part of their upgrade strategy - i.e, containerize the application, move to <your distro of choice cough rhel 7/atomic cough> while having the userland of the previous release intact.