depends. I have a pretty good stash of compatible devices going back a few years (as I've been tinkering with meshtastic since 2022), and some are on very old firmware versions. If "SHTF" unexpectedly and I needed to deploy them to as many community members as possible, a good percentage of them would be useless because they are not compatible with the newer versions of the firmware. (on the upside, I do stash the firmware zips on my NAS, along with tons of other OSes, drivers, firmwares, etc.)