(Meta) Stable Release or backport LTS strategy?

[tunesmith]

What version of Next.js are you using?

various

What version of Node.js are you using?

various

What browser are you using?

various

What operating system are you using?

various

How are you deploying your application?

various

Describe the Bug

Just as an example - Earlier, when we tried to upgrade to a 10.0.x release, we ran into problems and had to downgrade to 10.0.6. The particular issue we found was being tracked and was not fixed until 10.1.x, but we delayed since we also wanted to use webpack5, which had an issue specific to our deployment approach that was not fixed until 10.2.1 . We upgraded to 10.2.3 with the thought it would be more stable than the other 10.2.x versions, but it has an issue that is not fixed until a canary version of 10.2.4 . Our policy is not to use canary versions and instead use dot releases, but 10.2.4 does not exist since it became 11. 11 reportedly had other problems that were not fixed until 11.0.x, and we're wary to start testing 11 until a couple more dot releases happen.

I realize in our case, the solution is just to change our policy and use the canary version, but it seems there is a general pattern of fixes not being back-ported; they are applied to future versions which may then also include other unrelated problems. So we've felt like we are trying to thread the needle to find the perfect version that fixes the issues we care about, and where the problems it introduces are not relevant to us.

Expected Behavior

The latest dot release of a minor release (10.2.3) should be more stable than previous dot releases of a minor release. Bugs discovered in later major/minor releases (e.g. 11) that are relevant to the previous minor release (e.g. 10.2) should be applied as a dot release to the previous minor release.

Are there plans to switch to this approach or is this basically a won't-fix ? If it's a won't-fix, I thought it would be good to at least see it as an explicit issue that can be searched for.

Also more minor issue but would be helpful - in PRs/issues, when a fix is noted as "fixed in latest canary", it would be nice if that PR/issue were later updated to specify exactly what release number it appears in - as it is, we search through the changelogs to find the PR #.

To Reproduce

See above

[tunesmith]

A bit more context, just as an example. We were waiting on a webpack/NextJS bug (#25055) that was fixed in v10.2.1-canary.6. We chose to try the latest dot release of 10.2.3. Our developers are having trouble because of #25434, which is fixed in v10.2.4-canary.3. Upon upgrading to v10.2.4-canary.3, I discovered it is affected by #26163, which is fixed in v11.0.1-canary.2. #25434 was introduced in v10.2.1-canary.9, which is luckily after the 10.2.1-canary.6 that we need, but we tried out both 10.2.1-canary.6 and 10.2.1-canary.8 and they both apparently have a different webpack bug that does not exist in 10.2.3, which prevents our app from starting... this basically means that none of the 10.2.x dot releases or canary releases are stable for us.