The 8th gen processor requirements are really craziness. what kind of mainstream operating system is supposed to not run on four year old hardware?
My PC has a 6th generation Intel. Years ago, I subscribed to the dev channel of Windows 10 because I wanted to try WSL (the first one). I kinda forgot to "exit" the dev channel, and a few months back my computer was upgraded to Windows 11 silently. No issues since then, except that now I need to reinstall Windows 10 apparently. I was only upgraded to 11 to get a taste of it as a thank you, but now that it's been released it's over. Honestly, if they knew from the start I would have to roll back, a prompt would have been nice before updating. Or just let me keep 11 since it works.
No they won't. People will happily continue using Windows 10 and 7. Anybody that wants to sell software to Windows users will probably understand that many users won't be on Windows 11 and will therefore offer versions for 7 and 10.
With hardware lasting at the very least 3 years, expecting no a new OS to also work on the last equipment you bought cannot be considered “crazy”.