I still use an EeePC on a fairly regular basis, so I agree with your statement, but also I think that the desire to drop support for older platforms is itself a concession, that it's too hard to engineer software at an abstract enough level where ISA doesn't really matter. I understand that maybe fewer people are using those machines, but outside of some really platform-dependent code in the deeper parts of the kernel, how much should ISA really matter? Of course, in reality it does, in the sense that virtually nobody writes truly "portable" C code and instead encode all kinds of implicit assumptions about things, but that doesn't mean we should accept that or that the solution is to just bake those assumptions into the system as a whole and stop supporting architectures that violate those assumptions. Instead, supporting more architectures and finding more instances where implicit assumptions about hardware behavior are violated is actually beneficial to constructing a more abstract and easily-portable system, which incidentally can benefit all of the rest of the architectures as well.