You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower. I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down.
In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar with its codebase. Performance and usability will only degrade in this situation and the specifications of newer hardware don't excuse constant deterioration in performance.
The people are still there, but there's no organizational impetus to always use them, plus they have other duties now. The team being disbanded means a loss in product tightness and quality control.
Windows 10 is for newer hardware anyway, it runs slow on older hardware.