This is not really true for a number of reasons. pg_upgrade is absolutely the preferred method if you are able to spare small downtime. It will absolutely work to upgrade your existing data structures to be compatible with the new Postgres version, so not sure what you even mean.
It doesn't automatically re-create indexes (to take advantage of new features) for example, but that is likely something you don't want to do right away (incurring extra downtime) when you are doing an upgrade anyways. You can easily just REINDEX after the upgrade is complete.
If you read the link about pg_upgrade, you're not guaranteed that pg_upgrade will work if the underlying data storage format changes. pg_upgrade may not work in a future version of PostgreSQL. It works for version 14 though.
It doesn't automatically re-create indexes (to take advantage of new features) for example, but that is likely something you don't want to do right away (incurring extra downtime) when you are doing an upgrade anyways. You can easily just REINDEX after the upgrade is complete.