Only 5 years out of date now 🙃

Java is also a lot of fun in this regard. They've actually dropped support for java 8 about 2.5 years ago. But Oracle has added a "premium subscription" that gives companies another decade or so of extra support to delay updating their code even further. https://endoflife.date/oracle-jdk

Worse yet. They switched licensing and costs several times and companies should prepare to get hit with new licensing fees:

When they introduced Java 17 (a LTS version), they published it under the NTFC license. This means, this version is usable for free, but only until the next LTS version has been out for a year.

On Sep 19th 2023, Java 21 was released another LTS version. That means, that Java 17 just switched from the NTFC license to the OTNLA license a few days ago - which means, Java 17 is supported until 2029 but you now need a paid license to use it.

Hope everyone upgraded to Java 21 or newer in time.
- Isn't this only for Oracle's JDK?
  
  Just use an open source fucking solution
Isn't java generally backwards compatible? I switch java versions willy nilly in my (small) projects and never really noticed any problems when upgrading the version
- Yes sure, but not forwards compatible. That means if you need to fix a bug or add a feature in a project that is build on java 8, you cannot use language features from later versions. They are pretty important features at that, like a workable Http client, modules, container compatibility, records and enhanced switch statements. It is not fun to work like that, it's what makes good programmers want to become chicken farmers.
DECADE?
- Linux 6.1 will be supported until August 2033 btw
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
oh, that's a cool website

adds it to bookmarks and search bookmarks
Doesn't every company offer that? "Yeah we're really done supporting this, but if you want to spend a million quid a month on it then sure, you can have ultra extra extended support", then every old company that relies on this for their money-printing machine and can't be bothered updating their ancient code sends them a blank cheque.

I'm so glad I never had to work with angular. Those constructs always disgusted me

Confusing syntax to replace confusing syntax, library dependencies that let you do nothing you couldn't do without them. Generic solutions are always the best for specific problems, right?
- Why yes! We need the kitchen sink there, just in case we ever need to use a kitchen sink!

What’s the argument for using Angular over other solutions? Let’s say you actually need a SPA.

For me, as primarily a backend dev, the argument was that it's a framework, unlike React, so you get an everything-in-one solution which is quite easy to setup and use.

Given that Google still hasn't killed this one yet, it's also a mature platform with plenty of articles online on how to use it.

IIRC the license was also better than React's, at least last time I checked.

Not sure on what the landscape looks like today, but when I was making the choice, the internet didn't seem to consider other solutions to be competitive with either React or Angular.
To me at least angular makes a bit more sense than React's way of doing things does. React tries to be functional with its components and yet it seems like they end up basically trying to mimic classes with useState and useEffect. To me Angular's class-based approach makes a bit more sense (though I am primarily interested in backend development more than frontend so that could be why)

It does kind of fall into a lot of the traps of Object-Oriented programming though so I can see why a lot of people don't like it
What would be good other solutions?
- Vue and React are popular alternatives.
  
  Lit is a less popular alternative that's 100% compatible with native WebComponents, and I've been interested in it ever since I first heard of it.

I think it was 5 to 6 that was a really tough one for me because we had an in-house state management library that broke with the major breaking changes to RxJS. After that was pretty much no issue all the way from 6 to 17.

There are a few libraries we're using that stopped being developed after Angular ~9-10 and one we use extensively with breaking changes between 10-12. Updating to 8 wasn't too bad but for some reason Angular's update tool didn't actually do anything so I had to update the package.json manually and fix stuff by hand (luckily the only change was fixed with a bulk find/replace)