FWIW, it is easier to just not use Rust as the only serious build system I've had to work with that doesn't support this correctly is Cargo; and like, the mental model you are describing causes all kinds of other problems as it implies that if your build tooling simply can't run on a system old enough that you have to drop support for that system... people who are compiling serious apps (think Chrome or Ubuntu itself) and managing backports aren't sitting around with their CI systems running some old version of CentOS or Debian and praying their build tools continue to run on them: they just cross-compile.

And like, that Cargo doesn't handle this correctly is kind of silly as one of the engineers from BuildRoot seriously broke his back for a year jumping through hoops with them to come up with a compromise and satisfy all of their roadblocks (the Cargo people would rather spend hours talking with people about a patch than spend a few minutes touching it themselves... it was honestly demoralizing, but I've seen the same thing from projects like Flutter, so I think that it is just the reviewer / developer power dynamic that big tech taught a bunch of people) and the code is even in Cargo and yet is rotting in nightly.

(Meanwhile, I often see people bemoan how large projects aren't picking up Rust and using it to slowly cannibalize the C/C++ code in various projects, or are looking at distributions demanding answers for why there has been such struggle getting Rust code distributed, but the answers lie in the build model of the language and in no small part how difficult it is to use Cargo. If you just want to not care about those use cases and want to focus on self-compiled use cases--maybe you are doing web development!--that pick up all of the idiosyncrasies of the build system, then the community should just say that.)