I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device.
It is not just the overhead of supporting multiple different OS versions with different technologies, it is also that this support takes a lot of time while there's a tiny fraction of people that, like the author, use an old phone.
I've worked on apps with +1Mio users, and we did have users who were on very old devices using apps which were severely outdated. Those were maybe 1000-2000 of the one million. Adding a constant additional workload of up to 30% (you also have to run CI and everything on older devices) for 1000-2000 users is just not feasible.
If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.
I also don't expect to be able to run VSCode on a 1996 Pentium 60. I'd run Emacs instead, or Vim, or whatever else was en vogue in 1996