Yes turns out dropping support entirely is less risky than bad updates tanking performances, because you’re not immediately and personally causing issues.

Those are real issues but that misses the point that iPhones have seven years of support which also decreases the TCO of the iPhone to around 62% less than the competition.

Technically they didn't lose it -- that's a settlement. This might sound like I'm being pedantic -- and I am -- but it's an important distinction! It means there was never some official legal determination that they did something wrong.

The specific thing they were sued over was "we slowed down your phone when the battery got old, because the alternative was it crashing, and we didn't tell you we were doing it". Not explaining it was bad, but they've since fixed that, and the underlying technical thing they did seems reasonable and, to the point of this discussion, actually prolonged the usable life of the phone.