@SimmerGeorge Oh, there's absolutely a balance to be struck. I have an upper-midrange gaming PC I bought in February of 2020, and I'm generally in the camp of "long runners need to evolve with changing times."
I think that EA has always viewed the Sims franchise as being a game for non-"gamers" (in the sense of the "PC Gaming Master Race" enthusiasts who buy dedicated hardware for the hobby.) My old laptop—a 2016-issue laptop I bought for work and paid $500 for that just happened to play some fairly low-end games and ran Sims 4 just fine—is an example of EA's idea of its customer base for Sims.
In their eyes, the success of the franchise depends on having as large an installed userbase as humanly possible. If it runs on absolutely everything, then more people can buy it. That's a strategy, coherently executed, and it's made them gobs of money, so to expect them to change a fundamental philosophical decision like that simply isn't going to do anything.
And, of course, you can't please everyone because accessibility and higher-end hardware support are effectively mutually exclusive. Any decision to please one end of the market will, by definition, alienate the other end.
