That's fair enough, and I don't disagree with any particular part of it.
So, your test or development or staging system should be as close to the actual system as possible. Meaning: Install the same version of MySQL that they have on your own system and use that.
Yes, you may not have had to do that before. Well, that's not the case anymore. Sorry. WordPress now behaves differently for different versions of MySQL, in the same way that it behaves differently on different versions of PHP. That's really not going to change.