CentOS has always had minor updates. Current support for CentOS Stream releases (Stream 8 and Stream 9) is comparable to old CentOS major releases.

Not really; ABI and kABI breaks came only with minor releases. With Stream, they come randomly.

Also, Stream support period is much shorter than the corresponding major release (e.g. Stream 8 till May 2024, RHEL 8 till 2029).