Raspberry Pi Zero (W) are still great. There will be millions of them around in use for decades to come. I will probably always have a few in some drawer. Sad to hear that anyone even considers deprecating support for that hardware. Not to mention all other ARMv6 hardware still around. We need some baseline hardware types that just will always be supported, to add some friction to software rot and bloat in general.
Are you volunteering to be the one that runs exhaustive regression tests on every distro release? The open source community only thrives as much as people are willing to dedicate volunteer time into making it thrive.
I test my own open source code on a RPi Zero when applicable. I can report bugs to other projects if I happen to notice something is missing, but I can't decide what platforms they should support or not. I can hope that as many as possible can see the value in having some standard fixed, low-performance, high-priority, default targets that are "never" deprecated. But the only thing that would scale is that every project find their own volunteers to make it happen.
