Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?

Upgrades are hard. There was no replication in the before times. The original block-level replication didn't work among different major versions. Slony was a painful workaround based on triggers that amplified writes.

Newer PostgreSQL versions are better. Yet still not quite as robust or easy as MySQL.

At a certain scale even MySQL upgrades can be painful. At least when you cannot spare more than a few minutes of downtime.

"Not as robust as MySQL"? Surely you're joking.

They’re not wrong. If you’ve ever spent meaningful time administering both, you’ll know that Postgres takes far more hands-on work to keep it going.

To be clear, I like both. Postgres has a lot more features, and is far more extensible. But there’s no getting around the fact that its MVCC implementation means that at scale, you have to worry about things that simply do not exist for MySQL: vacuuming, txid wraparound, etc.

My experience of both is that MySQL is easier for developers, PostgreSQL is easier for sysads.

That was true in 2012; dunno if it still applies though.

I doubt it was true in 2012, because sysadmins would be the ones trying to make it run reliably, including things like replication, upgrades, etc.

Pretty sure that even in 2012 MySQL had very easy to use replication, which Postgres didn't have well into the late 2010s (does it today? It's been a while since I've ran any databases).