In reality, one massive update is too big to digest and it never happens. So you're stuck on out-of-date packages having lost the ability to update.
That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.
I think that’s the response the “it’s never a real problem until suddenly it is” observation was trying to head off.
There’s always someone who doesn’t want to take the advice of all the people who’ve been burned because “well it’s never happened to me.” I used to be that someone myself. Until the day it happened to me.
That's never a problem until it suddenly is. Company is put at significant risk (courts want to reason by analogy and "engineers skipped maintenance and endangered people" is an easy one) and nobody is to blame since nobody owned the task.