Why should someone who is going to throw their phone away in 2 years (or less) anyway be forced to subsidize those who want to keep theirs longer? There is a cost to supporting old hardware and that needs to be paid by someone.

I was assuming that we as a society would rather want to survive this century, but you're right, maybe we don't. We surely act like we really, really don't.

But hypothetically, if we were to want to survive, such regulations would be some of the very easy steps to take (and by far not enough, of course).

And again, I think you're right: it's far more likely that we as a society will just collapse, so maybe it's not even worth wondering what we would do if we didn't want it.

Throwing phones away is not going to cause society to collapse.

Why should someone who is going to throw their phone away in a day (or less) anyway be forced to subsidize those who want to keep theirs longer? There is a cost to supporting old hardware, and that needs to be paid by someone.