The problem is that the users contact the developer with bug reports, feature requests etc and consume the developer's time. The developer HAS ALREADY addressed those, often quite a while ago. It was Debian that decided not to backport/upgrade the changes. So the developer has their time wasted, and the users are unhappy.

In reality it is Debian that is in control, coming at the expense of the upstream developer and the users who experience issues or already addressed shortcomings/security fixes etc.