A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place.
[1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms:
"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Men at Arms"
[1] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
The Boots theory is funny because it's absurd. It's not actually applicable to life in powerty. There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy. People in poverty spend more _time_ on things, yeah, but not more money or money per use.
You can see some discussion on that from people who actually grew up poor in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068036776213383
I don't program in Rails, but, in the languages that I do/have I don't recall a situation where it was _likely_ that a function or API that replaces something deprecated in an older version, was already available in that older version.
The only case I can think of, that happens regularly, is that something would be deprecated and marked as such, with a replacement available at the point of deprecation.
That deprecated usage should be replaced before it is removed; and if we're talking about skipping multiple major versions over a long period, the replacement likely didn't exist in the older version, so this method still wouldn't work.
the answer to that problem in this approach is to do multiple step upgrades, rather than skipping
serious frameworks/languages do not remove methods in the same version that introduces a replacement, that's the point of having a deprecation mechanism in the first place