In practice most people do not run k8s upgrades through a CD pipeline. They are much more conservative about it. This is not a technical issue, just a cultural one mainly. People plan and roll out upgrades. Most organization treat a cluster as a large pet. They would like to avoid upgrading if they can because it's viewed as a risk. Patch releases are not typically an issue, it is minor releases that cause concern.
So every 3 months is too fast for a lot of teams (again, not technical issue, this is culture of enterprise) so they may put off an upgrade. Once you do that the upgrade becomes more risky because there is obviously more change from 1 to 3 than 1 to 2.
What I'm describing is not an issue specific to k8s, this is just a general enterprise infrastructure issue and one of the many reasons enterprises like LTS releases.
So every 3 months is too fast for a lot of teams (again, not technical issue, this is culture of enterprise) so they may put off an upgrade. Once you do that the upgrade becomes more risky because there is obviously more change from 1 to 3 than 1 to 2.
What I'm describing is not an issue specific to k8s, this is just a general enterprise infrastructure issue and one of the many reasons enterprises like LTS releases.