Supporting a wide array of all kinds of hardware is pretty much the thing on Debian. Some few has maintained the code for compatibility up to next release. For me personally that doesn’t do much, but I’m writing this with a machine released in 2010 so if they suddenly dropped support for anything over 10 years old I’d be out of luck with the scavenged old machines from work to run simple desktop anywhere I wish for cheap.

25 years might be pushing it a bit, but maybe some poor kid in India could use debian (or a computer at all) with a setup built from parts dug up from dumpsters or something like that. Or maybe there’s few active youngsters in some other poor country who have sharpened their teeth keeping the old stuff running as they couldn’t afford anything better and they’re building the next meta in Latvia.

Who knows. The main point is that keeping that support going is really not taking away resources from anything else. People maintain what they want to maintain and dropping support as a project for anything would only push those few away from Debian instead of their focus being shifted to the nouveau driver to support 4090TI or other new fancy stuff.

Debian is not a centrally lead organization where any single individual or team could mandate anything. If someone thinks that it’s important enough to keep Debian running on a old sparc they can do that (as long as it meets the commonly agreed quality and other aspects) and that’s it.

And no. I’m not a member of the project, just a happy user since 2000 or something near that, so I’m not too familiar on how the community makes decisions, but I think I’m not too far off.