It may be possible, too. As far as I’ve seen (and tried!), there has been a pretty odd phenomenon recently. It seems like iOS 11 was utterly abhorrent for everything (people were complaining with the iPhone 7 and the 10.5-inch iPad Pro left and right, battery was obliterated, performance was pathetic). Apple focused on performance by iOS 12, and while it still destroyed the early devices (like the Air 1 and iPhone 6), it was much better for newer devices as far as performance goes. While battery life has been severely reduced by iOS 12, it isn’t abhorrent (my 9.7-inch iPad Pro is 25% worse on iOS 12 when compared to iOS 9. Poor? Yes. But nowhere near newer versions). iPadOS and iOS 13 went back to the iOS 11 phenomenon, obliterating everything. The 6s is horrible on iOS 13 (I have one), 1st-gen iPad Pro users widely note iPadOS 13 as the beginning of the end (which is why I’m partially happy that I was able to keep mine on iOS 12, even if I’d rather have it on iOS 9).
Here, something changed. iOS 14 and 15 were good for many devices. I’ve tried an iPhone 8 on iOS 14, an iPhone 11 on iOS 15, and while older devices are never salvageable (the iPhone 6s is unusable on iOS 15, far worse than iOS 13, as poor as that is), newer devices didn’t suffer as much.
iOS and iPadOS 16 went back to complete obliteration.
It seems like there’s a bit of a back-and-forth between significant degradation, but a degradation which allows some form of usability (no update will be better than the original version. iOS 12 may have been decent and way better than iOS 11, but on A9 and A10 devices is nowhere near iOS 9 and 10 respectively), and the next version seems to regress, come running like an earthquake and just completely destroy everything in its path that isn’t the original device for that version.
iOS 17 for older devices seems like the continuation of iOS 16’s degradation. Hopefully later versions make it better for those devices. I have no doubts that Apple will improve iOS 17 for new devices as time goes by. Even iOS 11 - which was a complete disaster for everything - had improved by iOS 11.4. So I’m not surprised that it’s improving for the 15 series, and furthermore, I’m expecting it to improve as versions go by.
Long-term users may be better off just updating once to the latest minor version of the original iOS version, especially when, like you said, the original release turns out to be a little flaky, instead of doing what I do and just avoiding the update button altogether regardless of the minor version I’m in.
Of note, however, is that every iOS device I have is at a .3 version at least. I don’t have many, but still.
