We have a moderately-sized regional network at my employer (that's not an ISP) and I've seen a snide version of this. Our previous Director of IT who also made day-to-day decisions on things like peering would refer to 32-bit ASN holders as "six-digit trash." In his view, anyone who didn't have a 16-bit ASN was virtually not worth talking to. Not for technical reasons like our equipment didn't support the newer ASNs, just that they were Johnny-come-latelys.
He was quite proud of the fact that our employer had and still held a sizeable quantity of legacy, as in pre-RIR, IPv4 address space. I'm fairly sure one of the reasons he quit was because of the decision the board of trustees made to transfer chunks of this space to other entities in our same line of work.