Dude, I have to be honest..I've been doing this a long time and sometimes I have no idea what you're saying.
All I can says is that WordPress runs in the latest version of PHP.
The release number of WordPress does not coincide with a version of PHP. WordPress 4.2.2 runs on PHP 5.4 (or greater).
As far as "accumulating technical debt", and "developer overhead"...I don't know what all that means. Can you dumb it down for me?
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