When I left that position, we were in the middle of an OpenShift (k8s) deployment, and one of the things motivating the change was the ability to more easily run separate versions of services for different customers if the need arose. Yes, this would put a lot more burden on us as the service provider, but it would also allow us to iterate faster while maintaining stability.
Sure, but this should be considered either a defect or something highlighted by a major version number jump.
Or maybe he agrees and fixes it and it's included in distributions 7 years later.
I've changed 5 jobs in 7 years (because of life circumstances) and I'm not even a job hopper... How is any commercial shop going to plan around 7 year time frames?
It's effectively part of insisting that it's properly Free software - if you can't maintain your own bugfixed fork, but have to keep going to an external organisation for their version, is it really Free?