I mean, yes, there were fewer major features, but there were feature releases in those minor updates; there's nothing wrong with having stable software. Are you also one of those people who complain that stable Debian and RHEL releases include old software? Not everyone wants to live on the bleeding edge, and Java was a heavily enterprise ecosystem (for better and worse:]).
And the latest release is no bleeding edge. After eg. “feature freezing” JDK 17 before release, there was no subsequent changes to the codebase, meaning, they found no bugs whatsoever, which did happen beforehand.
Exactly, I don't get it why people think JDK 12-16 are inferior in any way, this is normal software tests in same way as any other JDK version.
The only difference appears after 6 months after release - if you don't want to upgrade (you should) you have to find vendor that will sell you support for given release.
E.g. Azul provides it for 11, 13, 15, 17. Oracle for 11 and 17.
Adoptium provides builds (not LTS) from 11 and 17 branches, where some vendors push their bugfixes. So it is like a semi-LTS, they won't fix your bugs, but if someone fixed a bug it most likely will end up on that branch.
