No, it is the symptom of a high velocity project. If Kubernetes were to have yearly releases, the list of changes would be four times as long and upgrade path would be a major leap instead of four minor steps.
I think a major leap is much easier to handle and to plan for.
I completely disagree. The complexity and risk of a change goes up with the square of the size of the change. Having moved from upgrading when forced to (almost) continuous upgrading, the number of moving parts in any given change is small and the frequency means we become skilled at rolling out changes safely.
That's fine and dandy if you can afford to put up the resources to keep your deployment up to date. For more constrained others, an LTS release can be the deference between using the project vs not.