Just as a point of reference (not that you'd necessarily agree) but I still get regular security patches for my Nexus 5 which is 3 years old. It's not the same

Just as a point of reference (not that you'd necessarily agree) but I still get regular security patches for my Nexus 5 which is 3 years old. It's not the same as entire-OS updates but in my time with iOS, I found that trying to run newer OS versions meant to leverage newer hardware on older devices was a generally negative experience. I have an older iPad that ran smoothly and wonderfully when I got it but after taking enough system updates, it now run so slowly that I only use it as an ebook reader. Opening more than one or two browser tabs slows it to a crawl and I've found no real way to just flash an older system image to get it back to a more usable state. At the same time, security updates are crucial so I do want to have those. The setup where I can get security patches every month or so but keep running a base OS version that the hardware can handle is ideal. Again, this isn't quite the same as the Nexus 5 is only 3 years old but it still runs surprisingly well with only major slowdown if I'm switching between lots of running apps due to memory limitations. I guess my point is that in some cases, it's more important to get the core security updates (which Nexus has a fairly good track record of) than the latest bleeding edge OS features. May not be as good as a device that seamlessly runs the latest and greatest for 3-4 years but I find that after a point, you can't really use those newer features if your hardware is outdated so it's been less of an issue in practice for me.