Given management’s refusal to undo unpopular changes like the plugin bundling, I don’t think this part is accurate. Maybe from a QA perspective, but even then I’ve had several kinda gnarly bugs not get fixed in past. At the end of the day, I realize they’re the ones investing time & money into it, so they get to make their decisions, but IMO I don’t think it’s a strategy to get more feedback.
I think the more realistic reason they do not support a proper LTS is it would cost someone on the team time managing/documenting it though. It’s a feature that primarily benefits self-hosters, so I imagine it would be considered a timesink to them. But it is kind of an expected feature and not having it is a real downside when forum admins choose their forum software since other contemporaries have more stable offerings.