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Am I understanding this correctly? FreeBSD y releases (x.y) are not snapshots of CURRENT, but rather are backports that are maintained separately from the really LTS x release?

I always assumed FreeBSD had a major release and then minor releases that were snapshots of CURRENT like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases were of Debian Unstable.

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Ubuntu's numbering scheme is year.month, not major.minor. FreeBSD's major releases are branches of CURRENT. Minor releases are branches from the stable branch.

This chart attempts to draw the relationship in ASCII: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/misc/...

FreeBSD creates a branch off current very close to a major release. So work for a new major release happens on current. At some point current blocks new features and focusses on fixing bugs. Then a branch for the major version is created and current can work on the next major release.

After that, minor releases mostly contain backported material.

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