Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.

"Regular" people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn't work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).

In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.

In that thought experiment there are more scenarios. Remembering that stepping on a butterfly can change... This is, small input changes can have big repercussions down the line.

You cannot assume what Linux would be in that scenario.

Who knows if it would have been colored by a main corporation.

Capitalism would have found a way to leverage it and new computers would be sold.

Your theory is based on the assumption that only Windows/Microsoft software increases in bloat exponentially.

This is not true: look at the internet. For example Gmail used to have a basic HTML version, but Google killed it, and the normal version takes longer and longer to load even on new hardware. New Reddit also is a mess of over-Javascript-frameworked capitalistry, complete with those annoying grey lines that appear where text should be when the page is loading.

Even open-source software is not immune to this. KDE on an Intel Celeron/2GB RAM computer feels very slightly sluggish, like walking through an atmosphere that's too thick.

Wirth's Law states that as more features are added to a piece of software, it will become slower.

While I do agree that the Windows upgrade circle is vicious and manufacturers benefit from it every time they sell a new machine. It's not the whole problem Linux needs to over come.

There is an incredibly large amount of sheer inertia that needs to be overcome. And that's a lot harder to to break than the upgrade cycle because users don't like change. It's like a huge boulder rolling down a mountain. And while you can see little pieces of it chip off now and then. It's due to the sheer size of that boulder that it ain't stopping anytime soon.

It's going to a lot longer before the "Year of Linux" ever happens.