Was 23 the first to be released under GPLv3? I think that is what stopped Apple from updating a number of packages.

They’ve also removed Python (Python 2), Perl, Ruby.

I think they mostly just let users install these things themselves, which makes sense, because then we don’t have outdated versions baked into the operating system.

Perl and possibly Ruby are still there AFAIK. Apple announced their plan to remove all scripting languages from the base install many years ago now, but it seems like the plan stalled out.

php was also bundled with macOS 10 and 11

Once upon a time I had to figure how to recompile it with all the "factory" settings plus one additional thing that I needed.

The first thing I install is "brew".

Then I get the latest versions of everything.

Oh no.

Anyway…