It’s likely that Adobe wanted or needed to do a major overhaul/rewrite of old code, possibly to maintain compatibility with changes in macOS or Windows. But the problem with that, which Apple also faces, is that you might have to rewrite the code for old stuff people don’t use much any more. And it’s worse if they depended on an API in the OS that was dropped, because they definitely don’t want to rewrite from scratch something they never wrote in the first place. (I think the Apple deprecation of FireWire is why Premiere Pro dropped miniDV capture on the Mac side.) The companies say, we would much rather put finite labor into future features instead of past ones, so they choose to not do all that rewriting and only bring forward the features still deemed essential.
It’s true, Apple has gone through that countless times. When they needed to modernize QuickTime Player, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, iPhoto/Photos, and others, the total rewrites were able to take advantage of the latest macOS features and technologies. But there were many useful old features Apple chose to not carry forward, and that angered many users for every example above. But Apple wanted to apply their finite labor to prepare for future workflows and not past ones.
In this case, there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting the application to support old media. It’s an issue for studios and TV stations with long histories that might have warehouses full of tapes from the last 50 years or more, and if they want to pull together a production with archive footage that isn’t digitized yet, they might find that many modern apps won’t support the old tape decks, formats, and protocols. It’s easy to say you can just keep old computers around, and I do that. But some of them have stopped working, so if I can’t repair them myself, at some point I might have to do something like find and buy an old Mac. Another solution is to send out old media to a company that specializes in transferring it.
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