The release notes for all Bitcoin Core versions up to and including version 28.2 say it's "supported and extensively tested" on Windows 7 and newer (or something to that effect).  But I notice in the release notes for version 29 that statement has now changed to "Windows 10+".

Can someone confirm Windows 7 support was quietly dropped?  I tried googling, but can't find any discussion about that or any explicit statements to that effect.

I'm interested in the backstory behind this change in the release notes.  Was that edit intentional?  Was there any discussion behind it among devs?  Have there been any specific codechanges introduced which are known to break on the older OS?  Was there a team member who did testing on Win 7 who left or no longer has access to that hardware?  Has it already not been tested on that OS for a long time and the team just decided now to adjust the release notes to reflect that?

I recognize Microsoft dropped Win 7 support a long time ago.  I understand there are security implications to running it.  I know most of the rest of the industry has moved on and the corpus of software titles that run on it is thinning.  And I acknowledge dropping support at this stage wouldn't be unreasonable.  All that said, I always felt it somewhat a badge of honor and testament to permanence that Bitcoin in particular maintained support for such an "OG" OS.

I'm not interested in arguing merits of the OS here, just genuinely curious about the change and discussion or consensus leading to it.

Also, is there a reason the bitcoincore.org landing page still doesn't mention version 29 at https://bitcoincore.org/, and that bitcoin.org still links to 28.1 e.g. at https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/?  Is 29 still considered very-new/upgrade-cautiously?