From reading your comment, you appear to think that I am assuming someone would ship XP to developers, that is not the case and I apologize if I wasn't clear.

From reading your comment, you appear to think that I am assuming someone would ship XP to developers, that is not the case and I apologize if I wasn't clear. I am assuming someone would use XP in a product that would be shipped to consumers. Companies have and will ship products with outdated or unsupported OS if they think they can harden them acceptably. See all the networking devices that run some variant of the Linux 2.x kernel that still appear on the market today as an example. Embedded XP was also a thing and probably still is in many places.