Meanwhile, my mom was just reminding everyone in my family that Android security updates stopping means they have to replace their phone more often than they would otherwise like to.
The architecture has been arm64 forever, memory and storage slowly increases but not in any way that really matters for an OS. There are specifically optimized apps to get the most out of the camera hardware and such, but if OpenCamera can handle all phone cameras on the market decently there's some level of API standardization and not that much to it. Some kernel drivers or wifi chipsets or something they can't be arsed to keep supporting? I really don't get why one couldn't theoretically just keep updating to the latest Android into perpetuity or why it's even an option not to do so.
Yup, there is no documentation for these chips, you probably gets some SDK with an old version of heavily modified linux kernel in a big ZIP file (so no version control history, no diffs), sometimes you only got some random binary blob. Because every chip manufacturer thinks (maybe right?) that with a good mainline driver or at least with good documentation all their competition advantage would disappear. (Some gigabit Ethernet phy chip manufacturers do the same even if 1 GbE is more than 20 years old...)
Imagine the same issue as the GPU card support as it was a few years ago, just multiply it by ten and apply for every insignificant peripheral device. (And nobody will start to reverse-engineer it, because you will not be able to buy the chip half a year later.)
I do not think this will change without an open chip (do no think it is possible, it would have too much NRE cost, maybe if some government use it to spin up local semiconductor manufacturing?) or some heavy regulation (eg. force compatibility between vendors).
We need to legislate that the user has a legal right to precise documentation of any hardware they bought.
Including any spying activity it might be enabling.
The lifecycle of a distro release is about how long you can get security updates without feature updates. But when a release goes EOL, you just... have another update, but this time it will include new feature releases of applications and operating system components as well as the usual security fixes.
You also don't really need an LTS for this. In the past I've run installations of Linux for much longer than 5 years on distros that don't do any kind of LTS releases at all.