The value of LTS, and the reason companies spend tonnes of money on support contracts for those 12 years, is exactly this though: the set of libraries shipped i

The value of LTS, and the reason companies spend tonnes of money on support contracts for those 12 years, is exactly this though: the set of libraries shipped in 26.04 will still be supported 12 years later without major backward incompatible changes. The very reason people would pay to keep using 26.04 in the mid 2030s and beyond would be that the software they built or bought in 2026 keeps working, typically without even having to recompile. You may argue that those customers should just update their software to use new versions of libraries or frameworks or replace discontinued libraries with new ones, or pester their vendor to do those things, or pay a bunch of money to consultancy companies to do those things; and you may well be right, but as long as those companies won't do that and are willing to instead pay Canonical, why wouldn't Canonical accept the money?