Robin
If these are common reasons, I would appreciate examples.
A good example is the freedesktop.org nouveau driver, which is deeply integrated into the kernel. When nvidia tried to brick my notebook some years ago by not providing the Xorg team with their urgently needed top secret blobs, so nvidia drivers stopped working, I had a chance to observe the consequences of installing a most recent kernel: Only therein the additions to nouveau concerning my GPU were present, even if the notebook was already old as the rocks. Older kernels gave me a lousy graphic with nouveau. And still this process is in flow, each new kernel can bring in some improvements in 3d acceleration, which is still marked as incomplete goal at their site for my GPU.
And then: You will possibly run into issues with the ext4 file system, which also is part of the kernel, when using an older kernel. You might not be able to access data on a drive written on a newer kernel, even when both are ext4. Reason: The ext4 versions are not upward compatible. Only newer ext4 versions can access drives written by older versions, not vice versa. I had this issue once in a place without internet access: No way to get to the data. Since you can fix the flags only on a machine with a newer kernel, supporting the ext4 version you need to access. There you can set it in a way the old kernel can read it, but that is not the default and you lose improved functionality.
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.