I agree. Originally SPIR (without a V) was just a 1:1 copy of LLVM IR with no commitment to backwards compatibility. Every time LLVM IR changed SPIR had to change as well. This lead to two major versions of SPIR. Clearly this is not a sustainable solution. Implementing several versions of the same IR is a huge support burden for almost no benefit. Now we have the successor SPIR-V which is no longer tied to LLVM IR. Anyone can implement SPIR-V support without LLVM. There is no excuse to not use it. It's basically the same story with WebAssembly. LLVM IR wasn't good enough so someone had to actually do it properly this time.