I believe the core apps have so much tech debt / tentacles throughout the OS that sadly they will never get to having say Messages update from the App Store. For example, the new Messages can pop up Photos overlay to generate a sticker. This would need to be an API to see if you have the latest Photos app with the sticker capability.
Maybe, but for Apple yearly releases are just free PR. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to write “if photos.app doesn’t have getStickerablePhotos API, tell user to update”