Does win 11 still require physical hardware to run? Why I have to sacrifice one of my motherboard slots for a worthless authentication chip that might stop working and brick my computer - ya I'll stay with 10.
It's either the LPC header or it's soldered onto the board directly. LPC header doesn't have any other *official uses so it's not sacrificing functionality.
Though I can understand why somebody wouldn't want to have a TPM module on their board. It's pretty easy to bypass that requirement in Windows (over and over) though.
You're not sacrificing a slot. TPM chips are typically either soldered onto the motherboard, built into the chipset, or (in the few instances that they are optional) go in a special port just fir them.
There are plenty of reasons not to move to W11 without making up new ones.
Technically it's an artificial requirement, it'll run just fine without secure boot and TPM, you'll just need to do some work around to install it that way.