Very much this. I dislike M$ as much as the next guy but it isn’t always their fault. The biggest reason we have outdated SQL in my experience is older software that clients do not want to pay for an upgrade for that uses a sql backend that will break if we have the databases in compatibility mode.
Just like M$ with good reason (mostly) end of life’s an OS they need to no longer mainstream support older software versions.
I mean yes, but one of the issuess with “state of the art av” is they are trying to roll out updates faster than bad actors can push out code to exploit discovered vulnerabilities.
The code/config/software push may have worked on some test systems but MS is always changing things too.