Not enough has been done to clamp-down on engineered obsolescence. Also, the customer's right to choose a product they already purchased. You get a mix of 3 years, 5 years, 10 years of support on any given OS now. Sometimes buying the hardware right before upgrade time, and having to deal with the crapware they load when they upgrade.

They use legalese now to say you are leasing the software, using with conditions, etc, but they love pulling the rug from under users now, and replacing it with an often-inferior product. This user-hostile mentality has been this way for consumer computers since they were created.

And managing Microsoft's hand of greed at the IT level sucks, too. Don't get me started on how "Microsoft Copilot" magically appeared on every windows machine in the world and starting using CPU cycles.

And the OP is right to install working software on old hardware as a reaction. It's a natural reaction. Ubuntu freed a lot of my old hardware. Gaming still sucks on Linux though.

If we mandated keeping things around a baseline OS a little longer, the need for foreign electronics could reduce in the short-term. Maybe it could offset those dumb tariff we're all paying for a little. Just mandate support for current OSes we have for the next four years at least while we wait for the economic tantrum to leave office.