This would be an option if the Linux userland wasn't a mish-mash of unconnected developers with their own practices and release cadence. It's why we have LTS distros where the company will put in the massive amount of work to preserve binary compatibility.

But the trade-off is that the software you have in your repos will be really old. At the end your RHEL support cycle libs will be a decade out of date.

OpenSSL

What about it

Breaks compatibility. They remove or rename functions often and openly say they are not going to maintain compatibility.

There are lots of alternative ssl libraries.

Point still stands: fixing the situation with these libraries seems like less fuss than turning Linux into windows.