This article doesn't explain why it will create the waste? What changed in the spec, is it enforced?
Or, if they desperately need Win 11, the resale value of "good enough to do homework on" computers is still pretty good.
But judging by the Win 10 rollout, the people who care enough to have the latest Windows to want it are a very small minority who have recent hardware anyway.
I would bet it's a marketing choice, to ensure the the rollout is smooth and people like the experience. The specs might be a deliberate overkill to ensure that the first users have more than enough hardware (which probably was tested well enough), and are more likely to be computer enthusiasts who want latest-and-greatest.
I have 64 gigs of ram in this and other upgrades, it works great, but it will die with Win 10 because the CPU isn't on Microsoft's list. When Win 10 support is done, so is my PC that I've invested a lot of money in. So yeah, it's going to become trash or a Linux box I haven't a need for.
For the record, none of my PCs support Windows 11. My desktop has no TPM and too old of a CPU. My laptop has TPM 2.0 but it's CPU isn't supported.
I was similarly confused by the article's lack of actual information. As it stands it tells me there are arbitrary CPU specs and a bunch of common hardware meets those requirements. But then apparently the situation is terrible, people will need to buy new hardware and the majority of consumer hardware is deprecated.