I haven't read the patch notes, so I may be wrong, but they probably don't upgrade the engine across any major versions? The developers just load up an old version of Unity to work in.
See Satisfactory for how much of a pain it can be to actually go through major versions, and how long it can take a more complex game.
Although, I will say that newer versions have made it a lot less annoying to keep up to date.
> The developers just load up an old version of Unity to work in.
Exactly. It's common in game dev industry to keep using the same version of Unity for a project. Sometimes a minor version is updated, and I do mean sometimes, because large projects break for the smalles changes (despite semver).