I was trying to find out if it works but I ran into the problem I described. Yes, there were a few years where the latest version didn't work but in many years it did. ghc used to give a warning, this is an unsupported version but we'll try it anyways. I would like to return to that.
In any case I believe ghc dev should test to see if it works and if so use it in HEAD. If it doesn't work than we should file a bug and fix it. In the past we got a few versions behind llvm. I think we want to be on the latest version available for each new release if possible. The earlier we look into this the more chance we have to succeed at that.