Comment 3 for bug 2028420

That is absolutely correct, it is not an MRE but under the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Other_safe_cases terms under the scope of an requirement to support new (virtual) hardware. Furthermore there is an agreement with Vmware to help testing those new releases as built in Ubuntu.

This process goes along not only the one you referred to, but is handled this way quite some time:
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1998558
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1975767
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1933143
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1741390
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1784638
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1813944
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1822204
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1844834
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1868012
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1877672
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1892266
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-vm-tools/+bug/1911831

it might have been just a bad muscle memory to call it MRE, due to the team doing so many others.
The bug description is actually right, a bit simplified compared to my old probably too wordy cases, but refers to the right rules. Just the title is wrong - let me fix that and set it back to in Progress.

@Timo
We do roughly one of these backports per cycle, and yes it was delayed by many other things for so much time that it indeed would now be better to skip 12.3.0 and directly go to 12.3.5.