Yeah that looks like a lot of time, except we're looking at some hard evidence saying it wasn't, after all.
Apple helped push forward the state of the art on many things by dropping legacies (No floppy. No CD. No more serial, parallel, scsi, PS/2 ports), but on some it just hurt its own customers with excessive eagerness (USB-C and dongle hell. Headphone jacks, where the ideal timing would have been NEVER. And this very thread about 32bit support).
MacOS is not iOS. There aren't just signed apps coming from a store. They failed to account for that. And this is coming from the company which managed to make the 68K->PPC transition, and the PPC->x86 ones, mostly painless for its users. This is so disappointing, knowing what they're capable of.
What do you mean they failed to account for that? They have a mechanism for signed apps outside of the store that doesn’t cost the developers anything and even that can be bypassed by a simple control click.
But for reference.
PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 and 68K emulation was dropped in 2006 with the introduction of x86 based Macs.
OS X was introduced in 2001 and OS 9 support was dropped in 2006.
PPC support was dropped in 2006 (?)
Most of the apps on the list have newer supported versions.
By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users.
Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU is still fully capable of running. There's no silicon advantage like on the latest iPhones. There's no big performance penalty running an emulated app, which would quickly drive people to use something native. There's no Moore's law obsoleting your current platform nearly as quickly as it once happened.
Apple has, in the past, treated people better when changing architecture that it just did with this thing, where the architecture stayed the same.
Edit: To the long list of past architectures Apple has dropped, maybe the root of the problem would be that I (mistakenly, maybe) do not consider 32-bit as past. I consider it still somewhat current, so seeing it dropped like this is less acceptable.
Apple sold 32-bit x86 Macs for less than a year, and they sold approximately zero of them during that year. It was a legacy platform that no one should have been targeting for nearly the entire history of macOS on x86.
