For real. I would expect this separate to have a marginally better understanding of software development than your average Joe but I've been quite disappointed in this thread.

Maintaining software is extremely expensive when it's as expansive as this. We're talking hundreds of millions per month for something like Windows just in salaries. Long term support has to be financed, that's the dirty reality, people have to be paid to do the work.

Agreed. I’m just looking at the machines that were purchased at the launch of Win 11, but might not have had the proper hardware to transition off 10. I would assume that computers on a that cusp will mostly support 11, but if the extended updates were free, it would ensure those machines would have had 7 years of security updates - which seems like a reasonable lifespan for a computer these days.

Making those updates free would also mean computers that were 13+ years old were also getting security updates, so maybe my recommendation is overkill.

At some point you just need to move on and stop taking customer service calls from people with old hardware.