To some extent, Apple has been like this a long time. They broke the compiler suite on macOS 10.3. Or rather, left it broken; there was a GCC ABI change and Apple did not deliver a GCC to macOS 10.3 that could produce binaries compatible with the new-ABI libraries Apple pushed in a security update. To continue compiling C++ code, in particular, for 10.3, you had to upgrade to 10.4 and get the latest Xcode there, it had a backwards compatibility setting.

The message was clear: if you develop for Apple, you need to always have the latest and greatest, because Apple simply doesn't care about you if you don't.