Let me get this straight, you're on a version released 6 years ago and complaining it's not supported anymore?

?. This comment makes no sense, why can't you upgrade Ubuntu? You don't have access to root?

Why are you stuck? Ubuntu supports updating over major versions.

Sounds like your problem, not canonical’s!

Which other distro still supports a release from 2018 without paying for support?

Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux (or CentOS before them) offer 10 years of support and they are free.

Purely anecdata, but I've lost count just how many Ubuntus (more accurately Debian and derivatives, I guess?) I've murdered in cold blood with sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade.

That's just normal updates; I've never had issues doing that.

That said, in-place updates to a whole new release has been fraught across every distribution I've tried it on, whether Debian-derived, RedHat-derived, or even a few something elses.

(Gentoo being rolling didn't have that issue, but instead different problems.)

Clearly I need to get my morning joe, because I was in fact talking about distro upgrades rather than package updates.