Expensive. Keeping us on the expensive hardware treadmill. My guess is that it cannot be listed in the Apple store unless its only for Macs released in the last 11 months.
This isn’t true you can set the target multiple versions back. The main problem right now is a huge amount of churn in the language, APIs and multiple UI frameworks means everything is a moving target. SwiftUI has only really become useable in the last coupe of versions.
Every time Xcode updates, it seems a few more older macOS and iOS versions are removed from the list of "Minimum Deployment Versions". My current Xcode lets me target macOS back to 10.13 (High Sierra, 7 years old) and iOS 12.0 (6 years old). This seems... rather limiting. Like, I'd be leaving a lot of users out in the cold if I were actually releasing apps anymore. And this is Xcode 15.2, on a dev host Mac forever stuck on macOS 13.7. I'm sure newer Mac/Xcode combinations are even more limiting.
I used to be a hardcore Apple/Mac guy, but I'm kind of giving up on the ecosystem. Even the dev tools are keeping everyone on the treadmill.
You can keep using an older version of Xcode if you like. I mean, every other tool chain that I can think of does more or less the same thing. There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple's developer tooling and relations, but I don't see this as being especially different to other platforms
