In reply to Peter.

In fairness, the discussion about dropping support for the elder browsers was focused on latest client side technologies for creating a new editing experience. Except as an afterthought to Matt's post, PHP version support was not part of that discussion or decision that I know of. I would certainly support updated requirements for PHP.

I've been around the hosting business for many years now. And the fact is shared hosting companies host users running all manner of apps that were built on older PHP versions, and while there's a sound argument for dropping past EOL versions of PHP, there's more to consider than just WordPress for them. Educating users about the benefit of PHP 7 will go along way to getting versions switched to that.

From a WordPress perspective, the benefit of best practices, codebase management, security are better incentives to drop support for 5.2 -5.4 than anything else. I personally don't create PHP apps designed to run on old PHP versions, and my hosting company doesn't offer less than 5.6 currently. But we are a WP hosting company almost exclusively.