It has to be as ancient as the oldest glibc you want to support, usually a Red Hat release with very old version and manual security backports. These can have nearly decade-old glibc versions, especially if you care about extended support contracts.

You generally have difficulty actually running contemporary build tools on such a thing, so the workaround is to use —-sysroot against what is basically a chroot of the old distro, as if cross-compiling. But there are still workarounds needed if the version is old enough. Chrome has a shorter support window than some Linux binaries, but you can see the gymnastics they do to create their sysroot in some Python scripts in the chromium repo.

On Windows, you install the latest SDK and pass a target version flag when setting up the compiler environment. That’s it. macOS is similar.