Both of those cards are unfortunately the last cards from AMD and Intel to not support Vulkan. Both the 7000 series (2012) and Broadwell (2015) support Vulkan.

I understand the frustration, but those are very old and very slow devices. A discrete GPU or a used laptop that supports Vulkan is likely less than $100-200 on eBay.

Worst case scenario, you could use llvmpipe software rendering on Linux, but it would be very slow.

Yeah there may well be some fairly reasonable hardware configs that are powerful enough to run the game but end up unsupported because of the vulkan requirements.

But you can always stick to 1.6 if your hardware can't run 1.7, so its not too bad.

You can not realistically expect developers to keep supporting obsolete hardware that has been without new drivers for over a decade.

Imagine someone demanding in 2005 that a new game should run on hardware from 1995. Yes, hardware lasts longer than ever before and it is annoying if you have no other option, but let's keep things reasonable.

ARM Chromebooks are also not gaming hardware. The game never supported them officially (as implied by your "fuckery" remark) and expecting developers to take tinkered solutions into account is even more absurd.