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The tool we develop at work has recently moved from RHEL 5 to 6 as the bottomline supported release. For us that meant a switch from GCC 4.8 to 6.3. So it's not that bad.

And when we switch to Red Hat 7 in the next 3-4 years we might start using GCC 8 with all those cool new features!

Lucky you. We’re stuck on RHEL 6. That’s GCC 4.4. And nobody we knows installs the toolset (I think the target user also needs to have it, because C++ libs?)

Nope, your users need not have the toolset, that's the beauty of it! It creates binaries compatible with any distribution newer than the machine where you are compiling. E.g., if building on CentOS 6.7, anyone on 6.7+ can run your binaries.

We also have an application stuck on RHEL 6 because of end-users, and I'm happily using devtoolset-7 which gives me GCC 7.x, and quite a bit of C++17 support :)

Edit: My understanding is that it achieves that by statically linking in the "newer" parts of libstdc++.

SCL/devtoolset is common.