[DonaldPShimoda]

It's so frustrating that people immediately jump for "forced/planned obsolescence" whenever something like this happens.

Forced obsolescence is the deliberate undermining of a device to ensure that it cannot be used in the future. That would be if Apple intentionally included code in Big Sur to cause older MacBooks to mysteriously brick.

There is a big difference between intentionally writing code like this versus not performing adequate Q&A to ensure that such bug doesn't exist, and only the former of these qualifies as planned obsolescence.