I guess I don't understand the part about hardware that doesn't go "obsolete" prematurely.

I recently upgraded to a 16" MacBook Pro. My previous MacBook Pro was a late 2013 model that still works (my girlfroend has it now), I just wanted more RAM (the 2013 was maxed out, system couldn't support more).

So the 2013 model was 7 years old, going on 8. It still got software updates and will even support Big Sur once it's released.

And the only software update that "broke" things was the one where Apple dropped support for old 32-bit programs. And Apple told developers that it was comng for years. It was an architectural change that was basically to make the system more secure.