I'm just talking about what I've seen for people who run businesses with large investments in audio equipment. It isn't just with updating software--that credo goes for which ports are attached, how things are wired, and even the levels on the console.

I have no idea if the examples I've seen ware relying on undocumented APIs and as a user it's irrelevant (there aren't too many choices in high end audio hardware and you can't always mix and match vendors). I've seen a new OS comes out, it no longer works with the hardware you have (or it introduced bugs), and nobody issues an update to fix it on either side. You're running a business, so you may or may not care about the new features, but what was working yesterday absolutely has to work today.

There's an article on the front page right now talking about how macOS broke the "poll" call. Nobody can say with confidence if it'll even get fixed. libcurl is working around it, but not everyone has the bandwidth to deal with it.