Linux is a nightmare in the embedded/appliance space because one ends up just having platform engineers who spend their day fixing problems with the latest kernels, drivers, core libraries, etc, that the actual application depends on.

Or one goes the route of 99% of the IoT/etc vendors, and never update the base OS and pray that there aren't any active exploits targeting it.

This is why a lot of medium-sized companies cried about Centos, which allowed them to largely stick to a fairly stable platform that was getting security updates without having to actually pay/run a full blown RHEL/etc install. Every ten years or so they had to revisit all the dependencies, but that is a far easier problem than dealing with a year or two update cycle, which is too short when the qualification timeframe for some of these systems is 6+ months long.

So, this is almost exclusively a Linux problem; any of the *BSD/etc. alternatives give you almost all of what Linux provides without this constant breakage.