That’s unfortunate. Which hardware version do you have? Apple has been supporting older devices fairly well from my perspective, often reaching back 5 years or more.
The iPad 1, which I owned though I'm not the parent commenter, came with iOS 3, and the final compatible release was iOS 5 two years later. It worked poorly with iOS 5 after two years, and was fully obsolete after three years.
Even for those early days, it went from new to obsolete extremely fast.
The first iPad aged really fast. I have a conspiracy theory that they brought the iPad 2 to Steve first and he told them to fatten it up and slow it down because it was already ahead of the market. There was a huge size decrease between the first 2.
I think that's just a thing with Apple version 1. The original iPhone, Macbook Air, and Apple Watch were all pretty underpowered, and were quickly and thoroughly obsoleted by the next one or two models. The first Apple Watch model faded so hard that it's now informally called Series 0.