Yeah, the weakness of the "this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power" theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don't try and install a newer Windows.

We're maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:

• OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
• Games

Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.

As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?

I think it's far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn't totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.