Not sure if I agree with the conclusion. maybe this is an issue, maybe times have changed. From my personal experience the 'stable' releases are just to slow to keep up with the demands on frequency of updates.

To illustrate what I mean, and this is ofcourse very subjective and dependent on my use case etc: I work on and manage hosting for RoR applications. I have a linux laptop I cannot develop on because I cannot install a recent version of ruby. Yes I can compile it manually or whatever, but that defeats the point of having distros etc.

On our hosting platform we use AWS linux, which is based of Centos. The latest version of Ruby on AWS linux is 7 years old. Our app probably wouldn't even run on it.

So we use containers. Special custom ruby images with recent versions build in a stable debian base. Now I have the problem that a.o nginx and nodejs have no recent versions available; versions that we either need for features or just because random dependecies.

So maybe the market for stable == 5+ years behind is simply not that viable anymore. Other distro's fill that demand and now centos can offer a distro for situations where you need a bit more recent versions.