I found the talk really interesting, especially how CentOS-Stream means SIGs can fork the hell out of it.
The Hyperscale SIG highly modifies it, by backporting tons of packages, shipping modern Kernel, systemd and more.
They also ship btrfs-kmod to use BTRFS like an out-of-tree driver on regular RHEL/CentOS.
They enable livepatching for the Kernel.
And a lot more!
PS: if you are looking for the official LTS Linux kernel, built for Fedora, CentOS & RHEL, check out this COPR
If they have good reason, they totally should! In fact this is pretty common.
One prominent example would be how runtime files for PostgreSQL & MySQL are incompatible between major version. E.g. if you’re to upgrade from postgres 11 to 12, you’ll need to do migration.
A lot of command line programs change their default behaviors, deprecate options, etc. This may not be so for coreutils (cp, mv, ls, ln, et al.), but for the more actively developed programs.
In the end, it might not be complete bad to have rolling release on servers, but in most case, it’s not worth the headache.