Still waiting for iOS and iPadOS security updates to 18 as per the tradition of supporting the past 2 generations of OSes rather than this sneaky rug-pull of trying to foist fugly 26 on users who don't want an unusable device.

This sort of spurious patching and releasing token cheap devices is a form of gaslighting.

Indeed! I was about to post something very similar. Glad I scrolled down a bit.