Sony uses "efuses" (one-time programmable electronic fuses) inside the Syscon chip on the motherboard. When you update your firmware, these efuses are physically blown. The bootloader checks these fuses every time you turn on the console. If the firmware version on your hard drive is lower than what the efuses expect, the PS4 will refuse to boot.
(as of April 2026), you might feel "trapped" on a version that doesn't support the classic jailbreaks. While the short answer is that you cannot downgrade via simple software
Firmware 9.00 is considered a "golden version" because it has a stable, permanent kernel exploit (GoldHEN) used for homebrew and jailbreaking. As of now, there is no public jailbreak for firmware 13.02.
PS4 Downgrade: Reverting from 13.02 to 9.00 for Jailbreak The dream for many PlayStation 4
Many users mistakenly believe that since 9.00 is jailbreakable, they can “downgrade” from a higher version to 9.00, jailbreak, and then play backups. This is false.