I disagree.

A modern cpu from the same price class as five years ago is twice as fast. NVMe storage is also many times faster than SATA, and five years ago hdd’s were commonplace anyway. I’m not even going to discuss graphics.

Windows 10’s hardware requirements are quite low: 1 ghz cpu, 2 gb ram, 20 gb hard drive. That’s 10 year old hardware. How much older do you expect them to support? Should it run on 20 year old hardware? To be fair 5 year old laptops might have driver compat issues on w10, but more likely the reason for the business uptick is just that pc’s only last so long before they need to be replaced, and for convenience of support they tend to replace in bulk.

Meet the silicone support policy: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2016/08/1...

Even 4 year old pc owners might find their systems to be partially supported: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-blocks-windows-10-cr...

Windows 10 hardware requirements are a dark art. I know of a place that has an analyst type person spending about 50% of her time tracking the various dependencies between office, Windows and hardware.