On the other hand if releases are frequent and small the whole long term support use case sort of collapses because every single update to the next release is just a few changes so it is much harder to justify staying on old versions for fear of unpredictable amounts of breakage.

In fact I would go so far as to say that I have never dreaded updates as much as when I had to go from one release to another where both releases were years apart and that upgrade was one RHEL version to another. Hundreds of packages, most with new major versions or other significant changes, is not a fun experience if you try to do them all at once.