> Practically speaking, do I need to be able to play phone games from 2009 on my 2017 iPhone? Not really. The problem is not that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2017 iPhone, tying 32b deprecation to a hardware revision would actually have been nice (regardless of the hardware still being able to run in 32b mode). But that's not what's happening, the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 o…
The arbitrary removal of 32-bit app support could be thought of as a heuristic to clear away abandonware. Which, for obvious reasons (security), Apple would like to have as little of in its App Store as possible. It also lets them aggressively deprecate and remove legacy APIs going forward.
It's a longstanding practice at Apple. At some point hardware & software are old enough that not only are they not supported, they're pointedly ignored when some appropriate new development "breaks" them.
Other platforms garner some favor by supporting ancient software, but I've long seen the subtly crippling consequences of preserving such backwards compatibility.