I've run into such plugins. It's especially annoying when making a custom theme and discovering that do_shortcode() doesn't work because some smartalec plugin author thought he knew better than the core WP devs. I don't think the latter can be blamed here. We know what happens when users of a platform come to rely on old bugs: it's called Windows.

Of course, it's the end users who end up suffering here. And that's another reason why they should have the option to not upgrade.