We're in the middle of a huge spike in LLM discovered security vulnerabilities, which means not everything will get assigned a CVE, a lot of people are watching repositories to look for exploitable bugs, and in the frenzy of backporting that people are now having to do things will get missed.

I wager it's only a matter of time before we see a mass rooting event that hits Debian hard while everyone running something more modern has already been patched.

I think that might be what cuts down on the grandstanding about "freedoms" and "that's how we've always done things". You certainly are, up until it becomes a public nuisance.