It's also pretty awesome that nowadays 4, 5, or even 10 year old computers are still totally viable to use for most use-cases, which would've been unheard of back in the 80's and 90's when hardware had such giant leaps in speed every few years. I'm loving that we finally have some longevity with hardware, and that Linux is able to actually extract that longevity from the hardware in spite of Microsoft's efforts to cut it short.

Sysadmin here. Much of the attitude is baked into old guys like me who remember PCs getting blown out by the next gen, which came 6-months later.

At my last job, it wasn't so much the aging tech as people beating the shit out of their laptops. Users treated them as disposable at that place. We made fat money as a small software dev, no one questioned buying new gear every 2-3 years. I was fucking appalled.

Closer to 7 years for the newest unsupported machines.

And just because somethings obsolete doesn't mean it's unusable. Your CPU is probably considered obsolete and not getting security patches, but I bet you're still using it.