Apparently I should not have used the word forced because some people went full-boar pedantic about it unfortunately. It's forced in terms of "if I want to run Big Sur, I have no choice" (thought that was obvious).

Not forced, but unnecessarily required to purchase new hardware to run the latest OS version which should not have any reason for not working on the older hardware. I still think that's a problem.

If there was a feature of Big Sur that required particular hardware to run, then I would be more understanding. Yes, I can stay on Catalina on my iMac, but it will continue to get more out of date when Apple could have easily kept supporting it. I'm understanding enough to know Apple has business reasons for doing it, and maybe even technical ones (that no one has yet explained) but it doesn't mean I agree with it.