Best news I heard this week. I hope bumping php to 5.6 follows rather sooner than later. At least the folks at Yoast are doing something about this.

It's possible that a lot of people running php 5.2 simply don't know about it. One of my websites is hosted on shared hosting and they provide users with a list of php from 5.2 to 7.1 to choose from. Many people may simply not know that they should toggle and option in their admin panels.