MongoDB enforces upgrade paths (4.2 → 4.4 → 5.0 → 6.0 → 7.0) to ensure data compatibility and structural integrity across versions.
Each major version upgrade may involve storage format changes, feature deprecations, and modifications to internal data structures, which are handled incrementally to avoid data corruption or performance issues, which is why it is recommended to do incremental upgrade.
Depending on how large your dataset is, it shouldn’t be too much time and effort to perform these upgrades - stay safe - do it incrementally.
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