I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

Waiting some weeks for uncaught bugs to be ironed out might be advisable if you still have limited debugging capabilities.

Otherwise, you can always nixos-rebuild build-vm using the new release channel and see whether it breaks anything you depend on.
My experience is that it probably won't. My past few years of updating my server from one stable release to the next were, in one word, boring. Some renames, deprecations etc. with clear errors/warnings to fix at eval time but nothing that actually broke once it was built and deployed.