When is IE gonna die? I'd really like to use flexbox/grid and other css/js niceties, but we still have 16% of users on IE. I know Microsoft is planning on supporting forever, but does anyone know if they are trying to move people off of it?
The year following the year of the Linux desktop!
I can't tell you where the magic ROI line is for you. Maybe you have to make the hard choices like "If we go this route [only evergreen browsers], we lose ~16% of our customers immediately, but we add X% feature/stability/maintenance improvements to our remaining ~84% customers, and hopefully one day we'll see at least some of those 16% come back to us the next time they get a chance to upgrade, likely in Y years." It's a business decision, and you don't always have to meet customers where "they are", you can make the tough calls and ask your customers to meet you in the middle. How angry that might make them, and how much business you might lose, is always going to be something you have to determine with your market in mind.
Like I said, it's always going to be a calculated risk, and I mentioned that losing customers is certainly a risk involved. Sometimes a small loss of customers is an acceptable risk.
There are mitigations for such risks such as making sure that "fewer features" alternative is your own (at the right maintenance costs), but also including taking things to standards/regulatory boards. Using out-of-date software is a HIPAA risk and an ethics risk. There are ways to convince HIPAA enforcement auditors and/or groups like the AMA that it is too much of a risk, or too unethical a risk and that some sort of upgrade horizon should be spread across the industry. That's not easy either, but it's not impossible, and it's probably a good idea in general in the long run (the regularity with which Day-0 vulnerabilities are disclosed would give a lot of weight to the risks of falling behind on software upgrades, for instance).
Our product supported IE7 at the time and let me tell you kids... that is trouble you've not known.
I got so fed up I just said I wasn't going to look at IE7 bugs anymore and wasn't going to invest any time in it. My decision snowballed and eventually that snowball led to dropping IE7 support across the whole organization. It turns out everyone hated it.
Sometimes you've just got to push for it and tell customers that's what you are doing whether they like it or not. We just told our Fortune 500 customer base IE7 support was dead, get over it. And they did.
Because businesses that are stuck with IE have made the equivalent of bad life choices.
It would definitely be nice to not specifically need the extra tools, but for a big enough project it seems silly to not use them.