An entire RHEL release is LTS. It doesn’t matter which way you slice it, it is an LTS. Once the 5 year mark has it, there’s no more minor releases because it is now in maintenance only mode. You’re misleading yourself if you feel the need to wait until the very last minor release to be “LTS”.
In regards to your example of your DE being broken on updates, if your DE is from EPEL, you must come to expect that these kind of breakages can occur. For example. We didn’t release a KDE live image (again) because sddm and the kernel in 8.6 had issues with one another (as far as I’ve understood it). For XFCE, we were able to move back to lightdm.