I also think that a curt “EOL operating system” dismissal has a problem that, taken to the extreme, it says that every software author would be justified in following the support schedule of any dependency, however inane that schedule is,—and there’s nothing in that dismissal that would prevenr it being taken to such an extreme.
That is not to say that running Windows 7 now is a particularly smart decision, no patches means no patches after all, no matter the marketing motivation behind that decision. I’m not even sure I’d call this particular part of Microsoft’s support schedule unreasonable. I am failing to find a legal, generally available, and supported Microsoft operating system I’d be willing to run, so one of those parts would have to be given up; but that is not the point.
The point is that there should not be a blank presumption that a vendor declaring EOL on anything at any moment is automatically reasonable and that it is right and proper to follow them. It certainly is simpler to offload that decision to them, but some sort of underlying sanity measure the result could be checked against ought to exist, and the parent comment (not that their stance is unique) is failing to provide any.
On Linux (at least a regular x86/x86_64 machine, not sure about other architectures), you can generally easily install an up to date Python version with pyenv.
