I did say "very simple mod", your wrapper could inject some autogenerated models (I'M NOT RECOMMENDING OR SUPPORTING OR ENCOURAGING OR ENDORSING DOING THAT!)
Depends what your trying to port, I just ported a 1.7.10 rendering based mod to 1.12.2 (it took me almost a year to learn the stuff required, but the mod was pretty high level). If I remember correctly, aside from the rendering changes 1.7->1.8 wasn't that big of a change, so you could probably go straight from 1.7 to 1.12.2. The best guide is learn to mod in 1.12.2, then take that experience and use it to port the old mod.
Forge code doesn't change too much except when a new version comes out (they save up forge changes for new MC versions), but yeah me/someone has to write a new wrapper for every supported forge version (which should be every forge version)