While upgrading &quot;just because&quot; should be avoided (and indeed, DHH stated as much in a keynote at one of the RailsConfs), that&#x27;s exactly the approach the Ruby community&#x2F;ecosystem have adopted as a whole. Most Rails plugins don&#x27;t maintain compatibility with multiple versions. And if you use something that overlaps with Rails&#x27;s dependency graph, you&#x27;re going to have to deal with that in one way or another.<p>In Ruby and Rails, you basically have to keep updating regardless of the changelog simply to amortize your costs. If you fall too far behind then when you invariably do need to upgrade a dependency, you&#x27;re going to have to pay all that cost in one swoop and the complexity of that amps up considerably.