It is certainly not our intention to make anything hard for people.
I totally understand it’s frustrating to have things that worked for 15 years go away.
If there were a way we could be everything to everyone and never leave anything behind, we’d do it.
That said, just like you, we have limited resources and we have to make choices focused on the future.
Some facts that went into this decision:
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Concrete 8.0 was released in 2016 - that’s almost a decade ago.
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We first started talking about an end of support for v8 in 2022:
Update to v9 before v8 end of life later this year! -
There is a repository of old Concrete versions on the open source site here:
Download :: Concrete CMS - Org. You can also install free extensions from the marketplace (even the old one) via Composer from there. -
The old marketplace had a lot of v8 extensions that were not being maintained, new updates we’re not going up, and maintaining consistent quality was a challenge.
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The old marketplace was written on a very old code base that had not been maintained, and so upgrading it was not realistic.
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The old marketplace promised you delivery of a working package and 30 days of support, period. We never promised free updates & maintenance for life. The developers in our community just ended up providing that for free because of how things were built.
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We looked at how easy it is to install extensions and themes across our competition and realized our connect to the marketplace approach was very out of date and an impediment to growth.
Given those factors, we made the choice to build a new marketplace, move the stuff that is supported by Concrete v9 into it, and curate it to look great and work well on a code base that we could maintain easily. We wanted to focus on what we could do to better serve people who are installing and running the latest version of Concrete today.
We certainly don’t want to brick old Concrete sites, and nothing we’ve done here will do that.
The reality is the web moves quickly today. PHP decides that things which used to work will stop in new versions, and we get to do painful releases to keep up. Hell, google just sold a bunch of domains we registered with their service to SquareSpace - I’m certainly not happy about that change either. 
If everything we try to do new here has to be prefaced with “but nothing we’ve done before can ever change or go away” - we will surely fail to keep up.
We are not interested in running a dusty library of breaking memories. We are interested in making it easy for people to communicate their ideas online with websites today and tomorrow.
That said, no you don’t have to go through every version. If your sites are pre v8.5 I would recommend upgrading to v8.4.5 first as there are some database character changes that were challenging. Once you’re past 8.5.6 you should be able to upgrade directly to the latest 9.3.x version.
Please do take backups. It’s possible some custom code won’t work well on that path because somewhere in there you’re going to want to upgrade from PHP 7.4 (which is also end of life btw) to PHP 8.x - and that has some changes to variable scoping that can cause some fatal errors.
If at the end of the day you need to rethink your choice of CMS because we no longer offer one click distribution of end of life software packages, I’m disappointed, but I completely understand. I’d strongly suggest you explore SaaS offerings where the site is continually upgraded for you. I totally get its a chore to upgrade, and the longer its left undone, the more likely it will cause pain when it needs to happen. We spend a good deal of our own time suffering through the same pain for our clients. Given that, we have started offering a SaaS version of Concrete here where there’s no access to the code base, but the site will always be upgraded to the latest without you having to worry.
Last, I can offer that if there is a particular package you need from the old marketplace which you have a license for, hit us up via the contact form and we’ll do our best to dig up a copy for you.
I totally recognize losing the old marketplace is a tough transition. We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think change was necessary.
We’ve very excited about how much easier it is to install extensions with the new marketplace and 9.3.+ already. The pace of improvements we’re able to maintain has increased. It’s going to be much easier for everyone moving forward.