not a dumb question at all. old versions still validate blocks fine, you just miss security patches and performance stuff. the real issue with BIP-110 is it changes what counts as a valid transaction which is a way bigger deal than which version youre running

Because all versions of Core after v25 don’t work as advertised policy wise, due to the not fixed inscriptions bug. It’s fixed in all recent versions of Knots, which is 99% copy of Core.

didnt know that about the inscriptions bug, good to know. so knots is basically core but with the policy fixes they wont merge?

Basically yes.