Are there benefits to moving a v4 site to a fresh install for v5, rather than just ghost updating?
I updated mine just fine. Using digital ocean.
If you’re on V4 and MySQL, do the update to latest V4, and then V5. Make sure you backup at each stage. If you’re on DO or Linode etc. take a snapshot before you start.
Also, make sure your theme is updated to support V5.
There are no real benefits to a fresh install, unless you’ve been doing additional things on your server and want a clean slate.
The official update docs go through the various combinations of version and database and indicate which kind of update to use:
Changing database uses a reinstall so your old site can stay running whilst you port everything over.
Reinstall is recommended for older versions because it gets fiddly trying to jump through the right versions of Node and Ghost CLI when you are so far out of date, as explained by our Node Compatibility Matrix:
If that table makes sense to you, then you can do an update rather than a reinstall even from v1 
As it stands, most people are gonna have an easier life doing a reinstall on a fresh Ubuntu 20 server or easier still, a new one-click DO droplet.
As you’re on v4 already, providing you’re using MySQL the update process should be fairly straight forward. You can do all the compatibility updates e.g. updating to Ubuntu 20/MySQL 8 and ensuring your theme is up to date first.
Once on the latest version of v4 with the right versions of everything else… it’s just a case of ghost update.
There’s quite a lot of database migrations in v5, but we were careful to keep them optimised and they are rip-roaringly fast.
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@Hannah – hey thank you for that information which is very helpful and exactly what I was asking for.