Maybe they can afford it, but why should they?
How long is long enough to avoid breaking something the users depend on? One more year? Five years? Fifty? I think we can all agree that it's reasonable to drop support at some point, making it just a question of when and at what cost.
10 years - a piece of software compiled with 'supported' libraries, SDKs and what have you should function for 10 years. An appliance or a service should function for 10 years and have spare parts avaliable for that long.
That is the guideline I ise as a consumer, if I can see that something won't last a decade, I won't be spending money or time on it if i can avoid it. At that point it's no longer a durable good, it's a consumable.
They could drop it with v12, or wait for v13, both would be fine. Dropping it in the middle of release cycle what people are objecting to.
I mean I already think it's... interesting that an operating system comes with (multiple) programming language interpreters, available to the end-user.
Apple is pretty aggressive about breaking backwards compatibility, as they did with x86, so it's no real surprise for unmaintained software to become completely unusable.
My company was shipping (somewhat niche) software linking with the built-in python2 up until last year though, and it’s been a scramble since Monterey to rebuild things to avoid the warning message. Definitely thought we would have python2 until 13.0 though (and part of me wonders whether this is just a “brown-out” for the beta and 12.3 release will be back to normal)
Yeah, fuck those end-users who might want to automate things with a script.
I am not to familiar with MacOS, but I imagine it comes with a bash/sh terminal? If so, then that is something that should be first choice for automation.
Everything else, be it python, perl, ruby or whatever should be installed by a user as needed.
Part of it is that it's just a mental burden to keep this kind of compatibility information in my brain. I have VMs set up of past macOS releases in case I need to run something old. I don't have VMs set up for earlier versions of a release, and I don't even know where I'd get an installer. Admittedly, in this case it would just be a matter of installing Python, but I don't necessarily know that as a user, or the software could need to be linked to Cocoa or some such.