In many cases supporting legacy IE is more hassle than it is worth, so people genuinely don't need IE8 users as customers.

Unfortunately IE8 came with Widnows 7 so is supported as long as that is which IIRC is until 2020 (for the extended support period). Given how long it took out corporate clients to upgrade from IE6 to IE8 (some only just have) if I don't change jobs I'm going to be supporting IE8 in our applications for the next seven years at least, but many people do have the luxury of being able to say "sorry, I don't have time to be supporting that" especially when they are giving their time/effort for no financial (or similar) gain (I'm at least paid to deal with legacy IE!).

No, they don't. Else it would be 90% IE.

Most people use Chrome and Firefox. And there are places in Europe where IE is almost non existent.

And even on the Mac, Chrome and Firefox users are as many or equal to Safari users.

So "most users stick to the browser the computer came with"?

Might have been true back in Windows XP days. Not for a long while.

I will say, most of my stats for clients show some IE10, more IE9 and fewer IE8 these days; about 5%/65%/20% split for IE versions with 10% for older ( IE/other browsers split at about 60%/40% ), and these aren't techy sites either. So there's some good news there.

IE9 Isn't too bad actually, though sadly, a lot of eye-candy projects featured on HN break outright on it or are prevented from loading upon browser detection.