So it's a good thing in that libraries can be leaner/meaner for everyone who doesn't need to care about old tech, but it also means the unpleasant work of supporting the old tech now has to be carried on by lots of different developers in lots of different companies, rather than being done well in one place.
If there's any possibility of keeping alive an "old-browser-support" branch of BS (like jQuery's 1.x and 2.x streams), that's rather better than abandoning it -- in theory we might be able to contribute some developer time into it.
> When we shipped Bootstrap 3, we immediately discontinued all support for v2.x, causing a lot of pain for all our users out there. That was a mistake we won’t be making again. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be maintaining Bootstrap 3 with critical bug fixes and documentation improvements.
The current plan is already keeping basic support in place for BS3, but no new features. That's probably just where we'll stay, then.