The time I'm thinking of was a team that wanted to switch from Rails 1.2 to 2.0 along with whichever interpreter bump was required to make that happen (IIRC 1.8.5 to 1.8.6, but this was a decade ago; I'm pretty sure 1.9 hadn't come out yet). Halfway through a project.
DevOps here - yes, they do bother. Pinned set of dependencies, but one of them updates? Upgrade all of the dependencies. But don't worry, it's all in a Docker container (I have a completely separate rant about Docker's compatibility ignorant hummingbird).
Ironically enough, I think the current DevOps culture emerged partially because sysadmins got tired of saying no (if only so they could sleep through the night), so now they let developers tie their own nooses so they can be woken up at night.
It's wonderful to give up all of those software pages back to developers. And the developers do seem motivated to fix the bugs which wake them up at 3am, so it turns into a win all around. It's still hard to watch a new team come up to speed though, knowing how little sleep they will be getting over the next month because they made their new docker program stateful...
