Yes, looking at the current handbook, today you are right and my posting was wrong.
However, this is because the policy of FreeBSD has changed. Decades ago, when I started using FreeBSD, STABLE was like I said, the recommended branch for production and frequently it was strictly necessary to update to STABLE because it had important patches missing in RELEASE.
It appears that they have changed this some years ago.
However, I was oblivious to this, because it did not affect me as I do not track automatically their STABLE versions, but I do only some audited updates.
However, this is because the policy of FreeBSD has changed. Decades ago, when I started using FreeBSD, STABLE was like I said, the recommended branch for production and frequently it was strictly necessary to update to STABLE because it had important patches missing in RELEASE.
It appears that they have changed this some years ago.
However, I was oblivious to this, because it did not affect me as I do not track automatically their STABLE versions, but I do only some audited updates.