Those "upgrade to stay safe" approaches were always lies, because they never stopped.

If they ever made things better in any real way, they would have tapered off.

Those updates are the Collateralized Debt Obligations of the tech world.

A mix of honest bugfixes along with new features and redesigns and re-architecturing that dragged in new bugs and new cognitive burdens and captured more of our lives.

Crypto, NFTs, and AI have been successive waves of trying to foist these accumulated technical debt derivatives onto the next greater fool.

and we all just keep patching and patching and "upgrading" and patching