
Kudos, very informative round up of the situation.
It is also interesting to read these developments in the context of other news, also reported by El Reg (https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/02/microsoft_server_life_extension/) in which Microsoft announced that investments in software have allowed the company to extend the lifetime of its cloud infrastructure from 4 to 6 years. The announcement is the last of a series which also saw Google and AWS extend the lifetime of their servers and networking hardware by one year.