Comment by cryptonector

The reason you're getting downvoted is that what you're saying implies a shit-ton of work for the distros -- that's expensive work that someone has to pay for (but nobody wants to, and think of the cost of opportunity).

But you're not entirely wrong -- as long as you have API compatibility then it's just a rebuild, right? Well, no, because something always breaks and requires attention. The fact is that in the world of open source the devs/maintainers can't be as disciplined about API compat as you want them to be, and sometimes they have to break backwards compatibility for reasons (security, or just too much tech debt and maint load for obsolete APIs). Because every upstream evolves at a different rate, keeping a distro updated is just hard.

I'm not saying that statically linking things and continuing to run the binaries for decades is a good answer though. I'm merely explaining why I think your comment got downvoted.