My in-laws have probably discarded at least five or six Apple devices on that account. Typically they get used devices, with a good number of years of updates remaining, but the updates are pointless when iOS grabs 50% for it self and the actual update, resulting in a device that you may not be able to update even if you uninstalled everything.

The devices themselves are fast enough to run everything, you just can't update and eventually apps stop being available to the old iOS version they run.

Tin foil hat theory is icloud subscriptions is why image capture hasn't been updated in years and still crashes with big transfers. Not that I'd expect them messing with it at this point would generate a more useful tool.