How are developers to determine when certain parts of their pages will become invalid?
It shouldn’t matter if and when old pages become invalid. Validity (more often referred to as document conformance in the WHATWG) is a quality assurance tool to help authors avoid mistakes. We don’t make things non-conforming (invalid) for the sake of it, we use conformance as a guide for developers to help them avoid bad practices or mistakes (like typos). So there’s not really any need to worry about whether old pages are conforming or not, it’s only helpful when you’re writing a new page, and it’s always most helpful to have the latest advice. It wouldn’t be useful to check for compliance against last week’s rules, for instance. After all, we fixed mistakes in those rules this week!