Shouldn't employer also pay for the the mandated equipment and upkeep thereof?

Usually they do. I worked at one place where they issued me a junk laptop that was a hand-me-down from a saleman who couldn't sell. I was ready to quit over the slow builds but I wound up just buying my own development box which somewhat shocked my boss but it turned out OK.

Everywhere else I got a machine that was the same as what everybody else got except for the place that used Macs everywhere but I was the machine learning engineer so I got an Alienware laptop with a good GPU.

Framework runs Windows just fine.