lukgo
You are always on your own maintaining customizations. There is no easy way to upgrade when you have customizations. The best upgrade path for people with customizations is to setup a separate test install and upgrade that first then try re-applying your customizations and see if they still work. If so then good, if not then you’ll have to update your customizations.
It’s not advisable to stay on older versions as you’ll be missing out on all the latest security patches, bug fixes, and new features. We also only support two series at a time; currently 1.17.x and 1.18.x. You are using the 1.16.x series which is no longer supported so if you run into issues you’d be on your own.
Cheers.