Platform support needs to be maintained. There is no way around that. Any change in the codebase has the possibility of introducing subtle platform-specific bugs. When platform support means that some teenager a decade ago got it to compile during the summer holiday and upstreamed her patches, that's not worth a lot. Proper platform support means having people actively contributing to the codebase, regularly running test suites, and making sure that the project stays functional on that platform.
On top of this, it's important to remember that platform support isn't free either. Those platform-specific patches and workarounds can and will hold back development for all the other platforms. And if a platform doesn't have a maintainer willing to contribute to keeping those up-to-date, it probably also doesn't have a developer who's doing the basic testing and bug fixing, so its support is broken anyways.
In the end, is it really such a big deal to scrap support for something which is already broken and unlikely to ever be fixed? At a certain point you're just lying to yourself about the platform being supported - isn't it better to accept reality and formally deprecate it?
In theory I agree with you, and code written in a platform-agnostic way is definitely something we should strive for, but in practice: can keeping broken code around really be called "good engineering culture"?