I told it better 
The issue was frequently emergent when people updated their Arduino AVR Boards version from 1.6.21 or previous. With previous versions, the "old bootloader" setting was the default, but in 1.6.22 the "ATmega328P" option became the default. So the update breaks uploads for everyone with a Nano that has the old bootloader. Since the IDE automatically offers newer boards platform versions, they might not associate the update with the breakage and they weren't kind enough to do a major version bump to communicate the breaking change to the users. Arduino traditionally has taken a marketing approach to versioning (i.e., 2.0 == "new and improved") rather than following standardized professional software development practices.