And when developers really need current versions of libraries/tools on an LTS distro, the solution is to recompile these tools by hand. And you end up with a Frankenstein system mixing an old base with multiple versions of monkeypatched, hand-compiled stuff.
“I installed your software on Debian Potato after force installing the Ubuntu Cosmic package of GCC 8 and compiling OpenSSL with these options and patching that file so that it appears compiles. And it doesn’t work! Please help.” How can you expect devs to support that?