I have a wallet which was created with v3.8 and in use with v4.1.5.

I installed v4.2 and opened the wallet, and it looked OK. But when I try to open it with v4.1.5 it fails with error message:

This version of Electrum is too old to open this wallet.
(highest supported storage version: 18, version of this file: 44)

Is this an expected behaviour? Am I now forced to use 4.2 forever?

I could recreate the wallet for 4.1.5 using the seed phrase, but that loses the transaction descriptions.