Every major version of Windows has a constituency that drives it's reason for being. In most years new PC OEMs are pushing Microsoft to issue a new Windows as a way to push new PCs and create the impression their old one is obsolete. Win 10 was a bit of an exception as Microsoft worked to try to make as much old hardware viable so gather up that huge existing Win 7 (and smaller Win 8.x) install base by making upgrades doable and giving better perf than those old OSes. And Microsoft was still trying converge tablet users onto a more common interface. However PC OEMs were really unhappy that Microsoft didn't help drive a lot of new PC sales with this universal Win 10 runs on anything philosophy
Win 11 is worst Windows since Vista or ME is a very UN-compelling, problematic version that breaks a lot of things. (Esp UI preferences. For instance, in an era of common 16:9 displays putting your taskbar on the sides (far left for me) makes sense to eat up less of the premium vertical space -BUT Win 11 will not let you move taskbar off the bottom of the screen.). And Microsoft seems to know this so they let OEMs talk them into setting artificial minimum hardware specs like arbitrary cpu gens supported and security features that could have been optional just to force any user that wanted the "new Windows" to buy a new PC.
I imagine after some months when
1) OEMS have squeezed most of those gotta-have-new-Windows buyers into purchasing new hardware and are somewhat sated
and
2) Microsoft starts getting really worried about this low adoption rate ...then MSFT will roll back the requirements for Win 11 to allow most Win10 PCs to upgrade again.
If you don't see this happening, it probably means MSFT realized what a turkey Win 11 is and thinks it can rush a Win 12 into the market within a year or so. We can only hope MSFT repeats the mea culpa of killling the dumb Win 8.x interface elements they abandoned when they made Win 10 more Win7-like and makes Win 12 look more like Win 10 (and as configurable)
It's been disheartening over the last decade how much Microsoft thinks advancing Windows is just jerking users around on the UI without addressing a lot of the fundamental problems that this hairball of an OS has which users don't even know about. After all, where it counts, in Microsoft Azure datacenters, Linux is more used and Windows is drying up. Linux desktops have been better for just about everything for years now except gaming and it's catching up there.
It's only a matter of time before Microsoft inverts WSL and just runs a Win subsystem over Linux and Windows (14? 15?) will just be that layer packaged with a distro (licensing will of course be tricky) - As presciently predicted in this brilliant 2005 Gary Wolf Wired piece)