I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done.
Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.
Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates.
It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
“Galling” and yet the iPhone SE had legendary long software support, more than any phone which came before. Seven years might not seem remarkable now but back in 2017 it was rare for Android phones to get more than two years of software support, and often that was mostly security patches, plus one major OS upgrade if you were lucky.
This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.
This has not been my experience with Motorola, unless you’re talking about OS major versions. With my last couple of phones I got several point versions and security patches for 3 or so years. It’s not my experience so far with my OnePlus phone either. Certainly I’ve seen phones that never updated from launch day, too, but I don’t think only Google and Samsung do updates.
My less-techy relatives are routinely forced to upgrade because all of their apps drop support for their hardware.
I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.
My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.
I dumped my last phone, the Palm PVG100, because unwanted software updates made it too slow and ate up its battery life too quickly. It's too bad the PVG100 has the best form factor of any phone I've owned.
The Google Play Store presumably lol (or however Google pushes updates onto Android devices)
I certainly never manually updated anything. Obviously certain services like Lyft or messaging apps are unlikely to work without updates, but there was no reason to change and slow down my texting or email apps, they've done the same shit since forever.
Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.