Yes... You can technically spin up a RHEL5 VM and compile your code using GCC 4.2.1. That's what I think the Python community still does for manylinux1. The pro

Yes... You can technically spin up a RHEL5 VM and compile your code using GCC 4.2.1. That's what I think the Python community still does for manylinux1. The problem with that is GCC got so much better in the last fifteen years, that you might as well be programming with one hand. We shouldn't need to do that. There's nothing wrong with modern GCC 9+ which can produce backwards compatible binaries just fine. The problem is the policy decisions made by the Glibc developers. So if you can avoid Glibc and dynamic linking, then distributing to many distros and operating systems while using modern tools becomes easy.