FWIW, they have much bigger carrot near their non-business end for years now, and if it is not persuasive enough - I don't know what is.

If someone is using a component that important that far outside its EOL it isn't a performance issue. It's either something extremely legacy, massively underbudgeted, or maybe non-internet-facing and non-critical. It isn't the kind of project someone is fine tuning for high performance.

There was a pretty big performance improvement jump to 3.9 already.