https://forum.hostea.org/t/value-proposition-for-hostea-users/31/5
Although the linked thread is Hostea-specific, I believe if adopted across the Free ecosystem, the general quality of tooling available for dealing with recovery-type[0] upgrade issues could be resolved.
Hostea uses Infrastructure as code(IaC) for software deployment. If successful, we’d be creating IaC for upgrades as well, which allows us to do recovery-type upgrades for very outdated (non-Hostea managed)instances.
[0]: Recovery-type upgrades: Migrating from a very old version to the latest version. Doing so is rarely successful as seen here, but is needed as Free instances are often running outdated software and having the option to upgrade easily would be nice.