"Is this corporate influence?"

Of course? Fedora Linux is an asset of the company Red Hat, their prevailing revenue model seems to have something to do with adding their own brand of complexity to otherwise simple open source systems, see systemd.

Since its acquisition by IBM (NYSE:IBM), Red Hat has entered the conglomerate of publicly owned companies, their profits are linked together with other public hardware manufacturers like Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), through intraday traders and index funds.

In summary, removing support for older hardware increases sale of new hardware, hardware and software companies coordinate profit sharing through stock markets. Pretty simple.