Couldn't it also just be that the hardware manufacturers / OEMs finally managed to successfully arm-twist someone in MSFT into declaring a new version, in order

Couldn't it also just be that the hardware manufacturers / OEMs finally managed to successfully arm-twist someone in MSFT into declaring a new version, in order to intentionally obsolete more hardware? It's hard to do that on the "rolling release" Win10 model, which is actually why I liked it. There was sort of an implication that if it was "the last version of Windows" then I probably would be fine with my current hardware for quite a while. But major version upgrades have always had the risk of your hardware going obsolete with them. Just smells like an excuse for forced obsolescence to me.