@sun No, you don't need to, you can jump from any version to literally any version using apt dist-upgrade if you replace the repositories with the one of the version you want to jump into.

What happens at times is that you get a circular conflict where package A depends on B and vice versa.

Use apt to force install A and B and then reinstall A or do another dist-upgrade and it generally works fine.

I have been doing this for years and it always works fine. Ubuntu is based on debian dist-upgrade behaves the same.