Comment by JohnTHaller

I'm aware that the modern Drupal supports in-place upgrades for the most part, though white screen of death reports are still pretty common. My point was that there was a split from classic Drupal to modern 'you have to use the command line and should know how to code' Drupal in terms of upgrades from the 7 to 8 split-off.

From all my reading in the Drupal subreddit, modern Drupal isn't especially useful for real world scenarios without a bunch of contributed modules and stuff... hence Drupal CMS. Additionally, folks were recommending not using Drupal 11 until it had been out for well more than a year due to the sad state of contributed module upgrades. I'd wager this is due to the much smaller Drupal community than the version 7 highs.