Shared webhosters (speaking for Germany) have started to disable support for PHP 7.x as there are no security patches anymore.
That made it necessary to upgrade lots of WordPress pages, especially older ones had some quirks in themes that broke with PHP 8.
I've updated around 25 sites for an old friend (she's more into the design/content part, not the dev part) and made good money with that. "Stupid" work nevertheless, would've preferred to do something better than run a PHP 8 linter and see where it breaks...
Exactly. It's work for our engineers but not something to get excited about. Plus you need to explain to the client why they're paying $1000 for something called "PHP" which they have no concept of.
It's unreasonable to expect standard hosting providers to cater to those kinds of needs IMO.
Totally not, yeah!
My friend also was surprised/shocked that there were changes in the code necessary to keep those old sites up and running.
Next thing was installing and setting up the "OMGF" plugin to cache Google fonts for GDPR compliance. Stupid work, but quite a few billable hours.
I think the WordPress ecosystem really is... "struggling" (lack of a better word) with how the modern web and the world around it evolves.
But I get your point. :-)