If a year old is considered antiquated, we have some major problems in this world.

And it's kinda my whole point: code that can only be consumed wholesale as shipped might technically be open source, but if backporting fixes to a year old version is nigh on impossible, is it truly open source in practice?

Yes it is. That is like saying because it doesn't run on an Atari that it isn't truly open source.

No it's not. The Atari isn't one year old. Come on man, from your logic you might as well say that a one year old car should be fed hay since it's practically a horse.

Debian stable is using components often several years old, not just a year.

Some parts of the system evolve faster than others. I am glad for Debian's relatively conservative policy for all my servers, but I want an evergreen browser on my desktop.

But arch is a rolling distro.

Debian has a release model for a reason and it's their raison d'etre. Of course they don't want to compromise that.

Considering the amount of other distros that use them as a base they're providing something that people want.