My understanding is that, depending on the phone vendor, such support may only apply to security updates after ~3 years and not feature updates.

What about when that “support” is to brick your battery so your phone lasts hours because they know it is defective but don’t want to fix it?

Google’s hardware track record is a joke compared to Apple.

It's only been 2.5 years since they said that. I'm sure they will walk back on their word before it has been 7 years.