How should I master the Microsoft certification in new and old versions?

Question

Microsoft

I have been in system administration for a long time and basically gained knowledge through self-education and personal experience through trial and error. I decided to master the material of Microsoft certifications for at least two reasons: systematization of my knowledge and educational program on those issues in which I swam or on those issues that I had no idea about.
I'm not interested in passing exams at the moment. I am only interested in certification as a kind of additional benchmark that you can use to assess the correctness of your actions in your daily work. The question is that antiquities a la Windows Server 2003 are in the works, although Windows Server 2019 is already walking around the world. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what I want, but I need to proceed from the fact that the client wants or does not want to purchase new versions of the software. Accordingly, there are two questions: is it worth mastering the old certifications and then gradually moving to new ones, or is it still to ignore everything and use only the latest versions of certifications for mastering?
The second question is, is there a succession of exam numbers from Microsoft? For example, for the current MCSA, the first exams that should be taken on offerhttps://www.microsoft.com/ru-ru/learning/mcsa-wind... 70-740. 70-741. 70-742. If, for example, I decide to take certification for Windows Server 2008/2008R2, will the exam numbers match? The second question, as you probably understood, was asked because of the need to look for specific information on the Internet for review, so as not to miss any certification exam ... P2P in short.

Answer 1

IMHO: it's better to get certification immediately for new versions, if I'm not mistaken for things like Win2k3/8, there are no exams available in test centers and the certification line data is marked as deprecated ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam -70-6... for example)
As far as I know, exam numbers are different for each version of Win Server