My friend, if you have things setup and working perfectly fine why would you update anything ?
Just leave it as it is would be my advice to you.
If you decide to go for updates all the time then you will have to deal with all the issues associated with that.
I will happily leave all my Tasmota devices and HA as they are.
If it works just let it work.
If that makes sense 
Hey man, I’m not saying that leaving things as-is and not touching them is a bad idea, but my point is that if you have any dependency on ANY external services (And 99% of everyone here does) then eventually it will get outdated and need to be updated.
It’s not always upto you, but APIs change, depreciated and get removed. They stop working.
So like I said:
So you get to choose, but eventually. Eventually.
Well you may want to look at and eliminate those if you can; but looks like you cannot ? Not sure ?
I haven’t updated any of my Tasmota devices or HA for over a year and everything is fine here on my end.
I don’t know which devices or API’s you are dealing with so unfortunately I cannot help you with any of that.
Here on my end everything is working perfectly fine so I don’t update anything.
All the best and take care 
I dont think you’re understanding what I’m talking about, or you’re ignoring it on purpose.
An example of something within HA that will break REGARDLESS OF UPDATES, is the Yr platform and integration for Weather Data (The link doesn’t work because it was removed from HA as requested by yr.no, The Norwegian Meteorological Institute). You can find some details about that here and here but there is more info all over the forum and GitHub.
This basic (And some would argue a core) service of HA was REMOVED. Later, replacement platforms like this popped up, that required manual addition. This is not the only example of a service that disappears, goes EOL or is gets updated, depreciated, etc.
My point stands, that regardless what direction you take, “Eventually SOMETHING will break, eventually, in either case”.
As I have said clearly in this thread before, I don’t think ANYONE is using a 100% sandboxed, no external service, installation of HA. It reaches out the internet for SOMETHING, some API or service, that will EVENTUALLY BE DEPRECIATED.
You can ignore my point as much as you like, and pass it off as “well you may want to eliminate that”, but we both/all know it is what it is.
Anyway, I’ve made my point, I’m just being crystal clear about it.
If you don’t update, EVENTUALLY something will break, unless you are 100% isolated from all services. It might not be today or tommorow, but eventually.
Take care.
All good my friend. Your points are valid and totally understood.
No hard feelings I hope 
We may have crossed our wires somehow ?
All I know from my end is that if I don’t have any internet all my devices still continue to work as normal. Lights/switches that is.
Some things will break obviously; but hey, it is what it is.
Take care and peace 
to you my friend 
Yep, I just upgraded last night from 2021.8.6 to 2022.11.5 to add some new Zigbee dimmers I got and now, all my V8.5 Tasmota AutoDiscovered lights (setoption19 1) are grayed out in HA. Sucks to have to troubleshoot something that was perfectly working fine the day before. What’s weird is my Tasmota plugs configured as switches (SetOption30 0) are still visible but similar plugs configured as lights (SetOption30 1) aren’t. It really has something to do with lights per say.
For some reason, my standard sonoff switch devices are not showing up as switch.sonoff1 anymore, they are showing up as light.sonoff1 devices.
Does anyone know why this is and how I can change them to switch devices rather than light devices? Its messed up a bunch of my automations, and I’ve been trying to track down the issue for some time.
What does SetOption30 return in the tasmota console, and what version of Tasmota?
It may be the obvious solution, but did you try setoption19 off and then setoption19 on again? I had a similar issue and it was as simple as that.
No, didn’t try it but updated my devices and everything went back to normal.
I’m on the Tasmota GitHub page now and it says “MQTT is the main protocol for controlling Tasmota devices” Where did you find that they are phasing it out?
MQTT is and stays the primary protocol for Tasmota. HA MQTT discovery is not only phased out, is is totally gone in the latest versions. You need to use the Tasmota integration for discovery to work.
No they aren’t!
From Tasmota 9.2 on you need to use native discovery (setoption19 0) and not mqtt discovery (setoption19 1) and use the Tasmota integration. It still uses mqtt, but the Tasmota integration.