The perfect storm. Apple/App obsolescence and Covid-19.
A combination of iOS 9.x devices becoming obsolete and Covid-19.
I'd held off upgrading an iPad 3 which I'd had since March 2012. I remember getting it the week it came out, opting for the base 16GB model.
I'd chosen the base model because of the sealed battery and the £400 cost, there was no point buying more storage space, if it was going to get replaced in a year or two due to the sealed battery losing its capacity, so looked at what I needed at the time and kept things to a minimum.
It turns out it lasted me 8 years and the battery still shows 78% but over that time it went from a device that you couldn't fault out of the box, snappy and usable to practically unusable, due to a series of slow bloated/buggy software updates, to a point now where Safari resets virtually every time it attempts to open a complex web page.
Yet, the day I bought it, it was an absolute marvel, the Samsung retina display especially (and still probably better than the one on the iPad 2018, in terms of colour calibration). I really struggled to find fault with the device, back then.
I look at iOS today, it seems mostly full of useless bloat.