which honestly defeats the point of a "stable" distribution if the software provided is EoL, doesn't it?
Again, the point of a stable release model is that its packaged software doesn't have breaking changes for the lifetime of the release. Install something from those repos and it's guaranteed to run in the same way for the full lifecycle while still getting minor and security updates. So if the software you're externally layering on top of that suddenly requires new dependencies that you have to install externally too, and you don't like that, that's more a problem based on a misunderstanding of Debian than a problem with Debian.