If they are "bankrupt, disbanded, in some cases deceased" then maybe insisting on using those apps are not the best course for the user either...
Sometimes the apps are the only way to access something else, in this case a car remote unlock.
Sometimes someone has paid actual money for an app, more than the $1 baseline; some music apps are in triple figures.
What good is degraded performance because some BS game/app who on top of it is abandoned from its developer for years, and it will stop working anyway sooner or later, needs 32-bit mode? Especially when you can find 200 replacement that work fine in 64-bit and are upgraded regularly.
The main difference though is that you’d expect a device like an iPhone or iPad to last a maximum of about 3 to 5 years while you’d expect a car to last 10 to 25 years. Accordingly it would be wise to use future proof parts, not proprietary parts that go out of style every few years.
If Apple wants to force apps to do something, they can force developers to create interoperable data that can be migrated without the developer's consent or continued existence. Until then, Apple has more resources than Microsoft and Linux, which both provide backward compatibility for old apps on new platforms. This is a solved problem.
Why penalize iOS platform customers who were the earliest adopters and had the highest chance of creating data which is now orphaned in abandoned-but-functional offline apps? Let's not get into the Apple's mis-steps on the App Store, which is what caused many iOS developers to go out of business or stop supporting apps.
Besides are you planning on keeping the same IOS device forever? The newest processors are 64 bit only. I doubt that Apple will ever release a new device that will support 32 bit devices - except for maybe a new iPod Touch or iPhone SE.
If the developer does not have any interest in updating their own app, do I as a user care about their apps?
A developer's primary interest in their app is to earn an income. A user's interest is in using the app for whatever functionality it provided. There's no symmetry here.
There are almost 0 cases where I would withhold an OS update in order to keep using an specific app, let alone change my device, and I’m completely on Apple’s side for finally killing 32-bit.
If they only supported it on the 7 and below then it might be confusing to users why some people get to use older apps and others don’t. On the other hand if they wanted to support it on the 8 and X then they would have to have an entire processor emulator that would only exist to support apps that hadn’t been updated in years.
Don’t forget that Apple keeps tons of usage statistics from people who are willing to give them. Chances are they know pretty exactly what percent of people use 32 bit apps with any regularity and how much total time to use them for. If they were willing to make these decisions my guess is those numbers are very low.
People here on HN are concerned about it and there have been some articles on websites about it but I’m willing to bet that this whole thing is almost a non-issue.