You make it sound like an older gaming rig wasn't powerful enough to run win 11. It's not about the older hardware being too weak, it's about enforcing their TPM bullshit with which they aim to gradually create an apple style walled garden where they control what you can do with your machine.
I dunno, I've got a laptop who's CPU was too new for win 8.1 to have drivers or support for it, and is too old to put win 11 on it...
This is the first time they've intentionally cut off the ability to run their OS at all just based on hardware age when it could otherwise run it just fine.
Not dedicating support to old hardware is one thing, blocking it intentionally is something else entirely.
Oh, that laptop? High end gaming laptop that was 6 years old when Windows 11 released. The fact it's blocked is flat out ridiculous, and defending it is equally ridiculous.
That's not what anyone is asking and if that's what MS said then they're just dodging the issue entirely. If you buy a motherboard on your own today TPM still wouldn't be enabled. And their "support" never went farther than hardware manufacturers registering where Windows could pull driver updates from. So that's just the worst take I've seen in this whole thing.