If you have some sort of compliance requirements, you need to update because of the onslaught of CVE vulnerabilities in the older versions. They are mostly bogus like "regexp DOS" but you have to satisfy the process and update anyway.
It is not nonsense, DPRK poorness is majorly self-inflicted:
- they were actually economically ahead of South Korea after war, despite embargoes (granted they had USSR back then)
- they border with China, absolutely massive economy where you can sell/buy anything. China started embargoing them since 2017, long after the author was stationed there
Cuba is in much worse place embargo-wise because they don't border with anyone who can trade with, they are also horribly mismanaged as communist countries are but albeit being poor they are not starving level poor like DPRK