Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.
It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
I think you’re cool!
I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.
My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.
I certainly never manually updated anything. Obviously certain services like Lyft or messaging apps are unlikely to work without updates, but there was no reason to change and slow down my texting or email apps, they've done the same shit since forever.