Yeah but nobody else has as many a FreeBSD developers on staff to fix stuff when it breaks. Or, you know, to run monthly stabilization weeks and extensively QA before deploying to a herd of cattle.

There are so many factors in favour of Netflix running 16.0 which don't apply elsewhere.

14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0

This is not the recommendation of the FreeBSD project. (I would know, because I'm the person in the project who makes that recommendation where appropriate.)

Once X.1-RELEASE ships, (X-1).* is considered "legacy" and we recommend that it is used primarily for maintaining existing systems and that new systems are deployed with the newer major version. But at when it comes to 14.4 vs 15.0 we're not there yet; .0 releases are always a bit bumpy and it's very much a judgement call at this point about how much risk people want to take.

Writing the release announcement for FreeBSD 14.4! The release is ready (aside from propagating to mirrors and clouds) but I have until 2026-03-10 00:00 UTC to get the announcement email ready to go out.