For the record I think the device support used to be better before when they supported pre-android Nokias as well.

As a project grows in scale, there are a lot of development tasks that take a significant amount of time and effort for relatively little user-visible impact. However, in aggregate, there is a benefit to investing in those sorts of things.

I had no issues with old WhatsApp whatsoever and I'm not aware of anyone else having any either and I'm part of multiple groups that used to use it extensively.

The only thing that has improved meaningfully since then is end-to-end encryption, but as much as I love that it is only nice-to-have for me and I would feel a lot safer with just ordinary encryption as long as Facebook wasn't snooping in my contacts and metadata.