Yes — the reason we have stable releases is so that incompatible changes requiring manual action can be bunched up into sets that only need to be taken care of every 6 months. You will need to read the release notes unless you want to be surprised by the incompatible changes, which may break your config in subtle ways — even if it evaluates and builds without any issues, services may fail to start or data may be missing because a previously correct config no longer is correct.
This is also why we don’t have a “nixos-stable” channel.