7 years is generous for phones but desktop computers have had a much slower performance ramp up where even a 10 year old desktop should be perfectly cromulent for office tasks as long as you give it an SSD and enough RAM.

The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.

Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?