Are there any large projects that are older than 25 years that didn't go through that? The time based release thing as been recommended for about 25 years (can anyone get real data?), so newer projects may just be using it without knowing the pain, but for older projects it seems like they all went through it at least once.

Arguably Perl. And it also shows the real risk of sidelining everything for one big bang release.

I think they are just now back on to a regular release cadence, but they weren't for a long time.