I'm a little annoyed by Blender Foundation because they dubbed 4.2.1 "LTS". Only to immediately drop a slew of updates lol.

"Switching your software mid-project is a horrid thing" Indeed. Let me tell you a horror story:
When I was working on my Renamon model I had the bad habit of installing every single new version without uninstalling the old one, can't remember the versions but say, I had 3.2 or so, then installed 3.3, 3.4, etc (again can't remember the exact version), let's say up to version 3.6. Seems newer versions of Blender warns you about opening an old proyect with a newer version, however in my pc I used to open Blender first (direct link to latest version) open file, work on it, save it... But one particular day I did double click on the .blend file which open the file with the old associated version, so, the Rena model I used to work in 3.6 now was opened in 3.2, I did some work on her (can't recall what I did), then save it over and closed, now, I opened it again on 3.6 and I found out the file LOST ALL VERTEX INFO!! which meant bye-bye to all her rig and all her shapekeys (40 plus drivers which now no longer works). That was so frigging disheartening.
Fortunately I have two pcs I use daily, and almost daily I sync the files on both pcs, so I have a redundant copy on them. When I found out this (and I do the sync manually each night) I managed to retrieve the older version from some hours ago from the second pc which really saved me (this method saved me a couple of times).

But yeah, that's one of the problems you can get by constantly updating your Blender version.

At least you had backups, so it was just a scare.
Updating mid-project can sometimes break a file - and some software doesn't let you revert to your old version.
Not to mention changes that sometimes screw up your setup. Blender 4.3 for that example swapped the I and K keys for inserting keyframes in animation. If you just auto-updated software without reading patch notes, suddenly you have no clue why something isn't working.

So big advantage is to not auto-update. XP

To be fair it was pretty busted and needed the updates.
Also I don't get why half the big Blender updates make the Weight paint color mode stop working properly, and why it also usually makes selecting faces in Edit Mode super inaccurate.

Yeah, I made the jump from 3.1 to 4.2 (now 4.3), then found out the hard way that they did something to most of the shader nodes and a good number of my models ended up with some big oddity or another, so I've slowly been reviving old models to get them back up and running.

That's one of the weird things about Blender updates.
One of the changes to animation was changing the shortcut for inserting keyframes from I to K.
...why? Like, what exactly happened? Both keys are not in an ideal position, but why such arbitrary changes?

Blender is famous for that.
But at least it is free.

If I had to guess, I'd assume the "real" big-dog 3D modeling programs must use I and K the new way and TBF is just trying to align Blender with that to make it easier for people to switch.
Just a straight guess though, based entirely off that one time they switch the left and right click.

At least we can change the hotkeys if we want, I guess.

Still stuck with 3.6 because Avastar, the plugin I use to animate and rig for Second Life STILL hasn't released their 4.x update even AFTER ALMOST 2 YEARS!

At least you can still use a previous version of Blender.
But I'd suggest keeping the installer somewhere safe. I kept some of my old ZBrush versions just in case they decide to wipe them off the planet.