What most impresses me is that this happen on many markets that should be competitive by any sane rationale. Like group buying or hotel booking. Yet, they also do that kind of shit, and people still have nowhere to go.
The world economy became integrated and incredibly rigid.
More than anything I think it’s because corporate IT has had to modernize due to security. Security now wants you to update constantly instead of running old vetted software. You also cannot demand user use an old version of a browser that still supports some old plugin. And as a vendor it’s not profitable to support people who maintain that mindset.
Also “update to the latest version” is the new “turn it off and back on again,” when it comes to basic IT help.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share
Chrome is evergreen, even on Android. Safari, after a bit of a fallow period, is updated fairly aggressively, and though it’s still coupled with OS updates, it’s no longer married to the annual x.0 releases.
Mind you, I still believe, and practice, you should write semantic HTML with progressive enhancement. But at the same time, I absolutely do not think you should go out of your way to test for some ancient version of Safari running on a first-generation iPad Pro—use basic webdev best practices, and don’t spend time worrying that container queries aren’t going to work for that sliver of the market.
Now every browser gets updates, automatically and aggressively. The only real outlier is Safari, but even that updates way quicker than older browsers used to.
As a result, who needs backward compatibility?