There are "many administrators" on old versions? I don't really think most of that source counts. Dead wiki with no active users, admins that don't even care about installing new extensions, and admins who don't bother touching the wiki but if they did touch it to install something they'd upgrade MW first don't exactly count as people extension authors would care about compat for.
Topic on Manual talk:Extension support/Flow
I gave many other valid reasons as to why an administrator may not be able to upgrade the core.
See Manual:Extension_support#What.27s_out_there for some numbers ontop of the reasons. Assuming someone installing an extension would also install a new core and risk all their current extensions breaking (hence having to test everything) is a gross overstatement.