LW is unique in the way that it is by far the largest instance, it makes sense that they want to take their time to update, they usually come up with unique issues.
If people could move away from it to other generalist instances, that would help with the issues. My former main instance, Reddthat, is now unable to fetch votes in a quick way because LW centralizes so much of the users and communities. More details can be be found here: reddthat.com/post/16122033
Now that LW is on 0.19.X, users can move to another instance in two clicks from the settings.