The reality is that for the vast majority of people, even the simplest desktop Linux distributions are simply too high a learning curve to be useful outside the very basics. The problem is not that they're not usable when things are working right. The problem is that when things go wrong, problems rapidly begin to require levels of knowledge far outside what a layperson can reasonably acquire. A missing driver, updates that need to be installed, configuration problems - these all run rampant on Linux to degrees far beyond what one experiences with a machine designed for Windows. ChromeOS Flex is a partial solution, as many people are familiar with it, but it is useless on a lot of hardware due to lack of drivers and is not a good fit for more powerful machines.
On the other hand, if you install Windows 11 on a machine that doesn't support it, you get all security updates for the next year, and all the drivers you need are typically present in Windows Update. In situations where there is a need for legacy drivers, they usually work after a simple install. I have installed Windows 11 on systems from 2011 and 2012 and had it work flawlessly, and fast enough for basic use. Windows 11 itself isn't perfect, but moving from 10 to 11 is nowhere near the complexity of moving from 10 to Linux.
Of course, the big issue is that after that year of security updates, one has to manually download the next "feature update" and install it to get another year of updates. This isn't hard to do per se, but it's approaching the kind of complexity that the average person isn't going to navigate smoothly. I don't have a great solution for this yet, though I am thinking about one. For now, I just include disclaimers and documentation about what to do to make things easier. Even so, compared to something like a Linux major version upgrade, this is quite straightforward.
There is no legal or ethical reason not to just run Windows 11 on technically unsupported hardware to keep it alive. I think that's the best way to go.