If michh is working on plugins for other people, shared hosts can be pretty behind on their PHP versions. I just had to backport a wordpress plugin to 5.2(!), which came out in 2006.
> And PHP only makes it worse because it's old versions are absolutely terrible...
You just need to put your foot down. 5.2 is absolutely too much, I would never develop for it. Just tell them to stop being so damn cheap and upgrade to a decent hosting company. AWS is free for a year for new clients, there's no reason for them not to switch to something decent.