And even that was 13 or 14 years after Apple shipped their last computer with a Firewire port - long enough that those computers weren't even supported by macOS 26. Apple dropping support for a largely obsolete technology, which they hadn't used for well over a decade, should hardly come as a great shock.

Apple's Thunderbolt FireWire 800 adapter daisy-chained with their TB2-to-TB3 adapter should work on any modern system with Thunderbolt and FireWire support, as it just presents as a bog-standard PCI FireWire card.

So worst-case, you should be able to access your old drives on a modern Mac by booting from a FireWire-compatible OS (Asahi or older macOS) on an external drive.

You used to be able to chain three adapters:

Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 FireWire 800 to FireWire 400

to plug a modern Mac into an iMac G4 in Target Disk Mode

Now you need to add another layer: virtualizing old macOS on a modern Mac

I had one plugged into the FW800 port of my Cinema Display.

Only really used it as a scratch drive for junk but it was still handy.