The ARM chips in later iPhones and all M series Macs physically don’t have the hardware to run 32 bit software.

Should they still be supporting PPC software? 68K software? Why not old Apple // software for good measure?

Right now the last time I counted in 2012, there were 12 ways to define a string in Windows and you had to convert back and forth between them depending on which API you are calling. There are so many one off hacks to keep Windows running (see Raymond Chen’s blog) it’s a house of cards