I know it's said tongue-in-cheek, but popular frameworks taking this stance is valuable when convincing clients, leaders, authority, etc. to not require IE support. I've consulted on dozens of front-end projects, and showing the stance of "industry leaders" is the most convincing argument.
I've got clients whose customers using IE11 represent 1-2% of revenue i.e. $1M+ / year
They're an online retailer and those customers would just go to someone else who's site would work in IE11
People aren't stuck on IE11 out of choice, it's corporate policies and other factors at play
https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/time-to-kill-ie11/
1% is 1%. If you can’t find a better way to improve revenue by 1%, you’re in too narrow of a market fit.
However, there are presumably old computers in far-off corners of the world that still use IE11. I wonder what will happen there...
Edge is Microsoft's only general purpose browser ATM.
Maybe a dev tools startup etc. would accept the Industry Leader argument, but Retail for example would never pass up the revenue opportunity by dropping IE11 support.
I've always appreciated when libraries who drop IE11 support provide polyfills etc., or at least some notes on it, since the library author knows better than anyone which corners are not IE11 compatible.
This eases adoption in these other industries, instead of taking this hard stance which may sound good, but ends up limiting the # of devs who can use the library.
I've used a product for doing webcasts that 90% of the users were on IE11. The training was for nurses using hospital provided computers that are locked down by their IT staff (for good reasons). These poor users are forced to use the default browser that came with the OS. Every single issue that the users had was from someone using IE. Some hospitals finally relented and deployed Chrome for the users doing the webcast.