What a strange way to frame the issue. I am not afraid of keeping things running. Most of the time, it's simply not possible, specially when working with other systems and people, without ever increasing pain.
The world is progressing and software will be obsoleted. Yes, not all of it and not at the same speed (MS obviously being top of the line when it comes to compatibility and being able support it), but inevitably so.
It's not a strange take. It's recognizing that software goes to shit faster than it gains new features.
Continuing the Word example, enterprise users may indeed be better off with the most recent versions of MS Office suite, because of SharePoint and all other integrations in use. For a regular user, the best Word version to use is 20 years old.
FWIW, my wife stuck with ~15 year old Office version on her own computers, in spite - or rather, because - of having used more recent ones at work; it was only until this year that she was begrudgingly forced to update, as Windows 7 got EOL-ed and it was just simpler to download the current one than to dig out old disk images.
Enshittification is real. And so is the larger zeitgeist in software development and design, of declaring the users are idiots to justify disempowering them (whether through laziness or malice).
About the only new useful feature in the past decade, that became almost universal and that justifies subscriptions somewhat, is the "collaborative" aspect of syncing between devices. But note that the primary use of that is to be able to edit your work on multiple devices, which is effectively a per-application workaround over OS vendors being greedy and unable to get their collective shit together.
Some of the handy Excel functions (like XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA) are only available in the newer versions. Sure, they aren't universally used because of the inertia, but in my opinion useful enough to justify the upgrade.
You're right wrt. those new Excel functions, but I consider this to be an unusual exception - these all happened recently, so even if you want to upgrade for them now, you'd still be fine not upgrading for over a decade before :).
An office suite.
I occasionally write documents in Office 97. Yes, in emulation. And despite the emulation, it loads quicker and has no lag.
Some software does "rot" in time. But a lot doesn't. And we shouldn't be afraid of keeping things running.