I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Honestly i have no idea why my brand new 2021 MacBook contains such an old version
It's because in 2007 rsync switched from GPL2 to GPL3 for its licensing and Apple don't want anything to do with GPL3. That's why they use zsh as well, by the way - the version of bash they shipped with was prehistoric because bash also switched to GPL3, and rather than play nice with free software, Apple switched to a similar shell that was licensed in a way they didn't have to (MIT in that case).
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It's because in 2007 rsync switched from GPL2 to GPL3 for its licensing and Apple don't want anything to do with GPL3. That's why they use zsh as well, by the way - the version of bash they shipped with was prehistoric because bash also switched to GPL3, and rather than play nice with free software, Apple switched to a similar shell that was licensed in a way they didn't have to (MIT in that case).