The reason the world didn't end is because people refused to upgrade Visual Studio, in particular Microsoft's bigger customers. Microsoft surveyed their users for why people weren't making the switch to VS 2013 despite all the "nice" and "new" features introduced and the predominant reason was due to all the ABI breakages.

For VS 2015 they adopted a policy of having a stable ABI and have preserved ABI compatibility for over 10 years now [1].

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/binary-compatibility-...