That is why I dropped VMware. Since about 6.7, any hardware older than about 3 months is not supported. A really stupid business model someone came up with.
I kind of agree and dissagree.
From a homelab perspective its a pain in the ass - and it would be awesome to be able to run the latest software on any kind of old hardware.
From a business perspective that uses vmware its kind of a pain in the ass, but not as much, since many companies swap hardware every 3-4 year anyway - and you do not nilly willy upgrade major versions of any software, i.e. if you were running esxi 6.7 you do not immediately install 7 when it comes out - you test and assess and most likely wait until a couple of patches has been made that fixes some of the almost guaranteed child diseases.
From VMWare's perspective it makes perfect sense.
They can make better software by not having to support a huge ecosystem of old hardware.
Having only to test and support 1k different moving parts instead of 10k moving parts is an obvious win.
They will lose some customers for sure, but as a software developer I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to support old "whatever" - because it limits how you can build new features, since you need to make sure that you do not break anything on the old platforms.