alt Hacker News> 2022 and 2023 were good years. Looks like they were fighting the good fight.
I'd argue that 2022.3 is still the best option if you don't want any drama from your tools. Using "old" versions of game engines is generally much safer than the latest. Let someone else figure out if the new model of parachute is any good before you try it.
If the tools are dominating your thinking during development, you've perhaps chosen the wrong ones for the job. There is no shame in using older tools to build games. This isn't like a banking web app. No AAA studio is going to give you extra consideration because you have unity 6 experience vs something slightly older. Valve certainly doesn't seem to give a shit. There's not much reason to chase a higher game engine version number.
If you are a solo/indie studio and you are using a newer version of a tool because it appears to enable something in your game, you are probably not going to do well. The engine does not make the game. It supports the game. Concerns like the "Unity look" are a consequence of the developers and artists doing a poor job, not old or subpar tooling. Environment lighting settings have their own hot key. Breaking out of the aesthetic mold is trivial if you make any attempt to do so.
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>Valve certainly doesn't seem to give a shit
Valve is nonexistent in the modern gamedev community, Source 2 is used by approximately noone, and overall releasing one game every decade doesn't exactly make Valve a prominent voice in the gamedev community.
However, yes, companies lock their engines at whatever it was when they started their project, and any upgrades comes from internal engineering. Decade long undertakings like the "recent" FF7 remakes are still on UE4 and will stick with that for the third game, because that's what they started with, and at this point the rendering pipeline and workflow is theirs
Unity 2022.3 is a great LTS version to park an older game in maintenance mode on. It's where everything kind of congealed into a solid, reliable engine again, after the hot messes that were 2020.x and 2021.x. It's also still receiving updates for Enterprise users through Unity's xLTS program, which admittedly isn't within reach of most people, but it's a good option for already released, successful games that require continued support.