I understand but like I said, official PHP version in your distribution packages kind of act like an LTS anyway, people who use 8.2 are using Sury or similar.

I understand but like I said, official PHP version in your distribution packages kind of act like an LTS anyway, people who use 8.2 are using Sury or similar. > 5.x -> 7+ was a pain, mainly down to those projects being without composer or other really suspect practices that need fixing at the same time. Much of the actual issue was due to particular string concatenation methods or the mysql_* lib which is easily shimmed to something like PDO. That's what I meant in my other comment, while it's true, mysql_ was already being removed in favor or PDO in PHP 5's time, and PHP 5 to PHP 7 was almost a decade of developpement, so I don't think it's fair to put these issues on "too fast a developpement cycle".