Usually it’ll be available as a flatpak or something, which is a special container that can have outdated dependencies and whatnot without impacting the rest of the system.
So if you really need some old version of VLC or something, just wrap it in a container and upgrade away! The upgrade would remove any incompatible apps (not containerized apps, just the system installed apps) and it would be on you to create or install that package if you haven’t already (almost everything old I’ve needed is already available).
So go ahead and use the VLC initial release from 2001 or whatever, you might need to do some archeology to get the right versions of dependencies though.