The fact that simply patching the O.S. can be enough to make it work on older hardware is a testament on how Apple could make it work on it too, if they wanted, and without much effort. Which in my book reads as an artificial way to cut support for otherwise perfectly working machines. Forcing people to upgrade, buy more hardware, and discard the older one, even when they wouldn't otherwise have needed to do it (like…
They've been doing this for a while. MacOS Tiger included "Built-in FireWire ports" as a system requirement which led to some weird things like the 2000 366MHz iBook and the 1999 B&W 300MHz PowerMac G3 being supported but not the 2000 350MHz iMac G3.
0: https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200512110741388...
1: https://lowendmac.com/2007/unsupported-os-x-10-5-leopard-ins...