Apple is very aggressive about requiring the latest OS.
For example, XCode requires 15.2 or later.. which came out in December.
For the (warning pulled from ass statistic ahead) 99% of Mac users that dont install Xcode that isn’t an issue. Xcode is targeted at people developing for the Apple ecosystem, so this isn’t that weird.
If you want clang or gcc then you can do that without Xcode.