Of course no one wants to be forced to upgrade all the time - but you can't realistically expect software that old to be a viable option in 2022.
We are not even forcing anyone to upgrade - older versions of Corona run perfectly fine with R14+. We just cannot provide new features to people who opt in to stay with 10-8 year old host application.
If you want to use R16, you can use any Corona version up to v8. If you want to use the features introduced after v8, you need to update your host application. Same way as you cannot combine 2010 motherboard with 2020 CPU, for example. If the last usable version of your host application is 8 years old, the problem is really somewhere else than Corona cutting support for it...