There is nothing seasonal about Covid, we get a wave every time it mutates sufficiently. Initially that was about five waves a year in 2022 but the past year it’s been two to three. The lulls however still have substantial constant infection usually in the region of 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 while the peaks of waves can be 1 in 10. Now the gaps between waves have more people infected than the peaks of infections in 2020 and 2021.
The risk of Long Covid hasn’t changed much, there are still substantial deaths every year. It’s all bad news really, no treatments on the horizon to solve it just declining life expectancy and health the more we catch and spread it.
It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.
So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.