Except Apple has already been found guilty of throttling old devices to try to force users to upgrade. They’ve been doing this for a long time, but they’ve only been ordered to pay a settlement in recent years for doing it with their iPhones.
But honestly the older Macbook Airs don’t need to be throttled, they just need the old universal dongles to crap out, IIRC those things were useless without the dongle to connect all your peripherals .
The original Super Mario Bros on the NES in the late 80’s.