I know it's supposed to be a statement to take the absurd title of my article a bit further, but in some cases, I can see that being said unironically.
Nothing good would happen if some machine running Windows XP in a hospital that's hooked up to an expensive piece of equipment that doesn't run with anything else suddenly got connected to the Internet. Nor does the idea of any IoT device reaching past the confines of the local network make me feel safe, given how you hear about various exploits that those have.
On one hand, you should get security patches whenever possible. On the other hand, it's not realistic to get just security patches with non-breaking changes only. Other times, pieces of hardware and software will just be abandoned (e.g. old Android phones) and then you're on your own, even if you'd want to keep them up to date.
I used to work with state agencies and they run outdated unpatched Windows computers all over the place.
Nowadays I work in medical software and hospitals are running outdated unpatched Windows computers everywhere.
Nobody cares about updates. Almost nobody. I never saw Windows 11. Windows 10 is popular, but there are plenty of Vistas. I'm outright declining supporting Windows XP and we lost some customers over this issue.
My development tools are somewhat outdated, because compilers love to drop old Windows versions and 32-bit architectures, so sometimes I just can't update the compiler. For example I'm stuck with Java 8 for the foreseeable future, because Vista users are too numerous and it's not an option to drop them.
Hacker News is like another world. Yes, I update my computer, but everyone else does not. Even my fellow developers often don't care and just use whatever they got.
Nothing good would happen if some machine running Windows XP in a hospital that's hooked up to an expensive piece of equipment that doesn't run with anything else suddenly got connected to the Internet. Nor does the idea of any IoT device reaching past the confines of the local network make me feel safe, given how you hear about various exploits that those have.
On one hand, you should get security patches whenever possible. On the other hand, it's not realistic to get just security patches with non-breaking changes only. Other times, pieces of hardware and software will just be abandoned (e.g. old Android phones) and then you're on your own, even if you'd want to keep them up to date.