When talking about languages a lot of people talk about languages as if all programmers deal with is starting new projects from scratch and being able to use the latest version of the language, using current practices. For most programmers this isn't the case. Most programmers work on projects that were not started by them, and have been around for a while. Or software that is built on, or has to be closely integrated with, legacy code.

Based on your writing, you sound like either a junior engineer, or someone who has had very little responsibility for making resource allocation and strategic decisions.