It's not wild for people who choose to use a stable distribution that last released prior to smartmontools 7.4. It's exactly what they want and choose.

(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)

Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks (nor without benefits).

Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable

Only having to update once every couple of years is wild. And it’s also awesome.

That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.

Welcome to Debian. The newest stable release (bookworm) is from June 2023.