In short, yes.
Though that's not what they're talking about, I still feel like answering this.
If you try to run a program which was designed for an earlier version of Linux on a modern system it will probably fail for lack of shared libraries.
When you try building those libraries you may well find that the build fails for the same reason. So now you have to build libraries before you can build the libraries. And this will often go several layers deep, and sometimes you get into a situation where some library simply will not build without some manipulation because of changes to libc...
One famous concrete example is Loki games for Linux for which there is the Loki_Compat set of support libraries. As the years have gone on this approach has become less and less viable, to the point that you're actually more likely to get good results by running the Windows version of the game in Wine.
This used to be a massive selling point of Windows; they went through all the effort to make sure that there were DLLs and other tools to provide backwards compatibility. However, they have slacked off on that in more recent years, notably since Windows Vista. At this same time we also moved to 64 bit and their VM process doesn't support 16 bit even though it could be done. We can run programs in a 32 bit Wine process now that can't be run in windows without replacing the vm used to run old programs with something custom.
Today, if you want to run old Linux software, your best bet is old Linux in a VM...