Technically there are still plenty of tor v2 infrastructure software running out there. It's only the people using the modern Tor Project releases that cannot visit these sites. The rest of us still can.

I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get to my sites.

But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal was early or not, the switch to secluded, account requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting the bad system doesn't make it better.