So this whole bug is clearly just a packaging problem! The old compiled binaries still run on newer Ubuntu machines, so the easiest step to fix this bug is to simply add those old binaries to the unison-all and unison-all-gtk packages, which currently are empty and useless.
It would be nice to also backport the latest Unison to the old systems, but presumably that would be more work.
So this whole bug is clearly just a packaging problem! The old compiled binaries still run on newer Ubuntu machines, so the easiest step to fix this bug is to simply add those old binaries to the unison-all and unison-all-gtk packages, which currently are empty and useless.
It would be nice to also backport the latest Unison to the old systems, but presumably that would be more work.