Funding. I’d definitely look out for funding.
My general advice is use the best tooling you have now and not where the tooling will be in 5 years time.
5 years time is unpredictable in tech; for example look at how fast AI generators have progressed in just the last year! And I remember 5 years ago when every major tech company said that we would all be using game engines and creative tooling completely in VR by this point in time and ‘flat screens’ would be a thing of the past. 
Admittedly, Unity does not have a great track record with keeping to roadmaps so I would not base your choice around what is being touted for 2024, 2025, 2026 etc. Look at current LTS, current Tech Stream and the very next Tech Stream release and evaluate the state of the tooling and how suitable it is for your project.
Also, when you shift from prototyping/pre-production to production you will want to lock to a version of engine and stay to it unless you absolutely have to upgrade for a bugfix to a hard blocker or a platform requirement. When I visited studios whilst working at Unity, the studios that version locked typically shipped whereas the studios that chased the latest versions multiplied the amount of issues they had (due to regressions, etc) and often massively extended their development length (which in-turn burns a lot of money)
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My expectation for unity in 5 years:
- The editor will get even slower and more buggy.
- Out of all the QoL improvements people ask for the editor, unity will bring a few of them.
- More DOTS, Burst, ECS. Games in runtime will be even faster.
- A newer version of .NET, games in runtime will be even faster.
- But the tools unity provides (animation system, VFX system, baking lights, etc.) won’t be usable outside of tiny games and demos.
- UGUI will be a way to go in many cases because the UI Toolkit lacks features.
- More pointless buyouts of other companies instead of creating tools.
- More services.
- I’m expecting financial problems in the future.
- This means cutting a lot of positions.
- This means tools that are now barely alive will get abandoned.
- The unity engine will keep losing to UE in terms of creating hyperrealistic graphics, especially for games.
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Do not choose Unity if you plan a really long development cycle.
Is that ‘in 5 years’ a typo? 
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I’m only posting safe bets.
Trying to predict what will happen with RPs, input systems, or graph-based tools is just too difficult. It feels like everyone knows there are problems, but the developers, consumers, and management have different ideas of how to deal with those issues.
In the end, the roadmap lands somewhere in between. Who gets the biggest slice of the cake depends on corporate politics.
I think the implication is that you very accurately described the current situation, but I guess that is what you’re saying, that nothing will change, things will remain the same or will continue towards the same downwards vector they currently are going.
Think the only thing REALLY worth thinking of on this long timescale is DOTS. So if you plan a game that will significantly profit from that, because it uses mass of enemies and stuff like that, then keep a close eye on DOTS and hope that they stick to the roadmap conceptwise. That’s where most change is to be expected.
Most other things will just get gradually a bit better/prettier (URP/HDRP), possibly with one or two drawbacks but that’s how it is. At the moment, otherwise the only other groundbreaking thing that is foreseeable for Unity might be Nano Tech (something similar to Nanite) but that’s 3rd party: Nano Tech - Similar to Nanite - High detailed rendering for HDRP / URP and Built-In RP
The switch to C# NET from Microsoft instead of Mono/Il2cpp should be completed roughly in 5 years, but that does not bring many new features, just performance - especially editor performance.
That said, the next gen PCs should have even less issues with the editor. Just don’t use office notebooks designed for Word & Co.
For the Runtime it’s expected in 1-2 years and the editor comes later, if I remember right from that large thread.
Albeit I am a bit confused why the runtime is less work than the editor since the runtime has to take into account so many more platforms than the editor.
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MORE. HAIR TECH. DEMOS.
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Now I have a feeling that 5 years from now DOTS will still be unfinished.
In 5 years there will be no Unity. The way things are going I see Unity completely collapsing.
xD lol, so much faith in the tool you are using
Am I missing an /s? Unity coasts on inertia of existing pipelines, knowledgebase and community size that’ll take a lot longer than just 5 years to demolish even with the current unfocused Unity leadership. The core of the engine is basically frozen in time and is maintained relatively well, I don’t think that’ll change in 5 years no matter what happens in package land or what they acquire next.
The way I see the situation, it could go both ways. Either Unity pulls it together, cuts off old legacy fat and refocuses on replacement technologies where applicable or they continue to come up with ever new MVP poorly documented packages which further fragment the community to the point new devs will start to choose engines that don’t require pHD in package manager dependencies and incompatibilities. And even if the latter option comes true, it’ll be a very slow process. Changing engines is costly.
5 years.
Unity going bankrupt in 5 years is not completely out of the question. I think it would be easier to say that in a somewhat larger timeframe, because sometimes the process of bankruptcy itself takes many years, but still.
Well, if they went bankrupt, I wonder what would happen to all the licensing. Would the released source code be able to be used commercially at that point, if the company doesn’t exist.
(for the record, I don’t think they will go bankrupt in 5 years, I think it’s more possible that they will continue pivoting away from video games, until they find something new that works, and they will continue downsizing).
But if it does happen, we would all probably be fucked is my guess.
The tool is too significant to just disappear and be given up. They would be bought up by some other company who would automatically uphold the licences. Of course that company could establish a different business model etc. from that point forward and cancel support for certain versions if they wanted.
We shall see. Please do not call the 5% layoffs “downsizing” tho. Unity hasn’t really shown downsizing yet.
Then we will all be version locked like so many here advocate
We would be version locked to whatever is the latest version we can pirate, because I doubt a bankrupt company would do anything to keep licensing servers running. Remember a year (or two?) ago, that for a day no-one could use Unity because some server along their data mining / licensing chain was acting up?