It's more about maintainability than age.

Some ancient hardware which is still actively being used and which has plenty of maintainers willing to keep it up-to-date will stick around.

A driver of only a few years old with roughly zero drivers, no maintainers, and which forms an obstacle for other work? That'll be gone very quickly.

I'm still sad that Linux dropped support for i486 and early-i586 CPUs.

And more disappointed that distributions especially Debian the "universal operating system" has dropped support for i586 already (and is dropping support for i686)

Open-source doesn't have the same pressures of commercial software from Apple or Microsoft. I really love the idea of obsessive, perfectionism approach of providing indefinite hardware support to obscure old hardware (but especially once-popular old hardware), with adequate automated testing suites to test ancient hardware.

Maybe with agentic AI coding we'll be able to expand support windows, and even bring back hardware support for older hardware.