>As C/C++ programmer, the thing I notice is ... the people who complain about this most loudly are the web dev crowd who don't speak C/C++, when some ancient game doesn't work on their obscure Arch/Gentoo/Ubuntu distribution and they don't know how to fix it. Boo hoo.

You must really be behind the times. Arch and Gentoo users wouldn't complain because an old game doesn't run. In fact the exact opposite would happen. It's not implausible for an Arch or Gentoo user to end up compiling their code on a five hour old release of glibc and thereby maximize glibc incompatibility with every other distribution.