Yes 
Yup. The vast majority of people use the latest or release streams of Discourse, so that’s what the changelog site is optimised for. People choosing ESR are essentially ‘skipping 5 versions’ each time they upgrade, so you’d need to look at the changes for each of those intermediate versions.
You can do that by browsing each intermediate changelog, or you can use the filters to generate a custom changelog spanning the full range (as you’ve done). Perhaps we can improve the releases site UX to have some kind of quick-link to jump to an ESR → ESR comparison.
Looking back to the last ‘stable’ release, we didn’t have a ‘mega-changelog’ for that either. People had to read each of the intermediate beta changelogs for a full picture of the changes. So I think we’re moving in the right direction here - at least it’s now possible to see a full changelog, even if it’s not the smoothest UX.
For now, I’ve added a link to that ESR → ESR comparison in the OP here:
Thanks for the feedback!