Tired of hostility towards anything that isn't current-gen

The problem is that these people that take over maintainership basically don't exist. Even if they promise to do so, that rarely actually happens.
That means at the end maintainership for the "old stuff" is left to the normal maintainers.
And that's why they want to get rid of old stuff.

And it goes way beyond that: Keeping old things alive often causes overhead in completely different areas. Especially with things like big-endian support or general 32bit support. Putting maintenance burden on people who have never heard of the "old stuff" that some hobby enthusiast wants to keep going.

You see, if you want to keep ancient stuff running, you can just use an old kernel and/or an old distribution.