Same for me, I have a recent-ish desktop that works just fine (Haswell) but that TPM requirement means I can't upgrade... It's forcing me to throw away a perfectly functional computer if I want to upgrade.

Just out of curiosity, what part do you find troublesome? TPM, UEFI or both? And why?

For me personally, TPM is the concern because of how integrated DRM is with it. Light DRM is fine, and prevents casual rights abuse by casual players. Stricter DRM gets used to lock things up and it becomes pervasive and hard to discourage. It chews extra resources, requires more power, and eventually means that some things that probably should be copied freely eventually cannot ever really be. Just imagine if Doom had been written with TPM in mind. You would never see it running on any of the myriad devices that people have had it running on, and the knowledge gained during those builds would not have come into existence.

It can be the consequence of the hardware someone owns. As an example: my desktop is from 2012 and its performance does not justify its replacement.

Full disk encryption is an important feature. TPM helps enable that.

I can't imagine travelling with a work laptop without FDE.

You can still use BitLocker completely without TPM, but it needs an explicit change in Group Policy. If opted in, BitLocker setup will behave much like well known TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt, offering encryption options with a password or a keyfile.