I don’t think that’s a similar situation - the Linux kernel lost some functionality there, but in this case Ext2 filesystems are still fully supported by the Ext4 driver, so there’s no difference in “hardware” support.
The separate Ext2 driver was being kept for embedded devices with extreme memory or storage limitations where saving some kilobytes by not having all the new Ext3/4 features was useful, but when you can afford the extra memory, there’s no reason not to just use the Ext4 driver for all Ext2/3/4 filesystems.
I don’t think that’s a similar situation - the Linux kernel lost some functionality there, but in this case Ext2 filesystems are still fully supported by the Ext4 driver, so there’s no difference in “hardware” support.
The separate Ext2 driver was being kept for embedded devices with extreme memory or storage limitations where saving some kilobytes by not having all the new Ext3/4 features was useful, but when you can afford the extra memory, there’s no reason not to just use the Ext4 driver for all Ext2/3/4 filesystems.