My hunch is that the minds behind Windows 10 being the last Windows have moved on. New blood needs a reason for a promotion.
It's hard to do that on the "rolling release" Win10 model, which is actually why I liked it. There was sort of an implication that if it was "the last version of Windows" then I probably would be fine with my current hardware for quite a while.
But major version upgrades have always had the risk of your hardware going obsolete with them.
Just smells like an excuse for forced obsolescence to me.
It could very well be that old timers behind Windows 10 are getting tired of the new blood getting in their way. So they let things progress in a way that would let them stab the Windows 11 people in the back and swoop in to save the day with Windows 12.
Edit: ok wait this could be an episode of Silicon Valley although I haven’t see the last season
During the development of Windows 8 this code was discovered by a select and secret group of people. However, it was impossible to stop the scripts, silently executing on servers which are running in inaccessible concrete enclosures in Redmond since the 90s.
Cutting power supply or opening the enclosure to get to these servers would severely damage other critical hardware so they started soft countermeasures. Unaware developers would spread Windows 10 as the "last" Windows release but the operation to mitigate the Windows 11 terror could not be endangered by exposing this information.
To avoid global customer confusion, they chose their own strategy to deal with the sudden upgrade to "Windows 11" in 2021. They took the narrative into their own hands and jumped from Windows 8 directly to Windows 10, inventing some plausible story about why Windows 9 was missing. This way, the automated upgrade to Windows 11 could be masqueraded as their own choice