> Would not be simpler to just drop the support of Python versions <3.7 in new MyPy versions?

Not really -- mypy has a lot of users who run it over (very) large code bases that can't easily be upgraded. Basically mypy has to support all Python versions that haven't reached their end of life yet. (And it's also important that mypy not be constrained to the same Python version as the target code.)

I suppose we could just stick with the existing typed_ast that supports 3.4 through 3.7, but we actually have a use case for the end_lineno and end_col_offset fields that were just added to ast in 3.8, and in general we'd like to support any future grammar elements and ast features.