It was announced a while ago in the issue tracker...?
Anyway. How this worked with Java 6: First off, the Java 6 support was moved from the jOOQ Express Edition and jOOQ Professional Edition to the jOOQ Enterprise Edition. I offered a grace period of an additional 1 year to access the Java 6 distribution from the jOOQ Express Edition and jOOQ Professional Edition for no additional charge to existing customers. New customers needed the jOOQ Enterprise Edition to get latest version access to the Java 6 distribution.
The complete removal from all editions happened only when there were no more paying customers left who were using that version. I cannot guarantee the last bit, but I'm positive that only very very few customers will really be affected by the removal of JDK 8 version support in the far future. I currently don't see any good reason to do that. All new Java language features from Java 9 - Java 19 can be either avoided (e.g. switch expressions), or backported (e.g. text blocks, records, instanceof pattern matching to some extent), or ignored (e.g. sealed types, modularity). This was very different with lambdas. The introduction of lambdas in jOOQ's internals has greatly improved the codebase, so getting rid of Java 6 has been to the benefit of everyone.
I don't see that yet with Java 8, and by the time there will be significant benefit, most people will have moved on, because that long-term Java 8 baseline we as an industry all mysteriously agreed upon will have gone. See e.g. Spring's take on this (Spring Boot 3 will have a Java 17 baseline, this year!):
I hope this helps