It’s far from ridiculous.
If you don’t have the budget or bandwidth to manage customisations then I would urge you to simplify your setup.
It’s imho the (reasonable) price you pay for remaining on a cutting edge high velocity platform that keeps on innovating, improving performance, deploys frequent security patches and keeps up with evolving standards.
The Discourse team appears to put a lot of effort into ensuring there are deprecation warning messages well in advance of losing function.
Would you rather be stuck on an insecure platform with fewer features?
Think of the value you get from the well maintained core that you can download for free?