> That doesn't mean this is a good practice. In fact, I would argue that this type of thinking has created far more harm than good for both the IT industry as well as the companies that adopt this harmful practice.

> Case in point: many of these same companies that refuse to upgrade systems for a decade or more are still running Windows XP and Server 2003. Due to the negligence of their IT leadership, they are now vulnerable to all types of security vulnerabilities that won't be patched, and have put both their business and their customer's private data at risk.

There are legitimate reasons for this though. The way I understand it, a big chunk of the problem is that many software vendors refuse to properly separate security related updates from regular updates. Firefox at least has an ESR version, AFAIK there is no equivalent for Chrome. See also attitudes like that mentioned in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9164251

Similar examples can be given for MATLAB - I know of many professors who ask students to run some old and fixed version of MATLAB for many years - they do not want to waste their time dealing with the breakage that inevitably happens with newer releases.

If all vendors actually put in effort into maintaining LTS versions, the situation could be different.

I do agree that the idea of perpetual business value with zero maintenance in a frozen state doesn't make sense - but as a business, I would always be interested in minimizing my maintenance burden.