Very fair point :) All my other dependencies, using 5 year old versions is fine; it’s mostly just PHP that gets an order of magnitude less-painful to work with in each release, so being stuck a few versions behind is extra frustrating...
edit: I guess if you work somewhere with a policy of requiring you to use system packages, you're a little screwed, but that seems more of an organizational problem than a debian problem.
(The more I think about it, the more sad I am that it’s 2021 and still no other language has come close to PHP’s low barrier to entry...)
It's usually not that it's hard to do that for your packages. It's when their dependencies go out of date and I'm looking at having to build a Frankenstein system where I'm running one up to date system on top of a really out of date one, and trying to make the two co-exist in a single OS.
It's not insurmountable, but it's enough effort that dealing with occasional Arch breakage becomes easier. Or even something in between like Ubuntu.