Where do you quote this from? This was true for a while after the outage.
But if you look at the dates of the last S, R and Q builds now, the /e/OS build system (re-)built them quite recently, and they are all marked as upgradable.
This wouldn’t make much sense if the goal would not be to restore the ability to update and upgrade old versions via the updater.
Of course the updater might still fail, there were updater hickups in the past, but I would at least first really try the updater.