Is a Java developer I’ve always been happy moving up as soon as possible, if I see a benefit. I was quite happy to move up to 1.5 for generics. Java eight was fantastic because you got streams and lambdas. Some of the updates in 10 and 11 will take bigger changes to the codebase to take advantage of.

But even if you weren’t using the new features, there was basically no downside to upgrading the run time. The newer version is usually ran much better thanks to improvements in threading or garbage collection. And you knew you’d get security patches, even if you ended up getting stuck on that version for a while.

As you said, libraries and frameworks can be a big issue to upgrade.

But the backwards compatibility promises of Java have been so incredibly strong it hasn’t been an issue.

The one time breakage in Java 9 is basically the first I’ve experienced in my career.