> You can tell where somebody lands on the opinion spectrum by the way they use the word "stable".
> As used in this quote, "stable" means "not changing" and not necessarily higher quality.

Remember that "quality" is in the eye of the beholder rather than some universal spherical cow metric. In the above context, "unexpected changes" == "lower quality".

So yes, "stable" in the context of distros only ever means "unchanging except for what I personally care about". In other words, take an "LTS" distro and layer your $bespoke_production_software_stack on top of it.