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There are more layers, if you'd like to look into it.

- Web developers don't support older browsers because they lack the skill and economic motivation for it.

- The managers of web developers will not support them, because there is no money to be made in supporting older browsers. Nor are there career benefits in maintenance projects. No developer or manager will get promotions for it.

- The actual management of the companies will not promote or compensate engineering managers or developers for maintenance projects since it doesn't contribute to "line goes up"-economics.

> Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.

There have been a few attempts at this already and I have something like this myself for websites I design. Ultimately they fail to gain widespread traction since everyone has very different ideas on what of the various Web standards should be included at each version level. Someone else’s standard will likely not include that one feature you cannot go without so you simply do not follow it.

There’s a reason why this culture doesn’t exist: Internet Explorer 6

As recently as 2012, web developers had to make sure their websites ran on IE6, a browser from 2001, and were very frustrated that had to support this 11-year-old browser instead of being able to implement new features available with Chrome/Firefox/Opera and even newer versions of Internet Explorer.

There was a lot of resentment caused by this situation, resulting in web developers just not wanting to hold back their website so that it will render correctly in some random ancient browser.

>You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it

Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.