While it can be troublesome, I’d rather have a manufacture provide years of updates, versus own an orphaned device within a year after purchase. There is sometimes when an update is just needed because you can’t foresee the future. My router in particular had occasional issues with WAN speeds at over 100 Mbps when it was first released. While I’m sure in a testing lab somewhere Cisco had internet connections much faster than 100 Mbps 4 or 5 years ago, the average end user did not have that speed. There’s only so much in-house testing you can do. When more people started getting these faster connections, and problems were reported, they fixed the problem. My router also has 3G/4G USB failover. How is a manufacture supposed to guarantee functionality of a cellular USB modem that will be released in 6 months, on a 4 year old router? There are compatibility issues between certain makes and models of routers and security appliances when it comes to site to site VPN tunnels, that can be addressed with firmware updates.
Or what about this. So at the beginning of 2011, I purchased a high end Sony 3DTV, blu ray player and ES series A/V Receiver. All internet enabled with all of the smart features. A few years ago Google made backend changes to the way YouTube operates rendering the YouTube app on my three devices useless. I haven’t had an update to any of them in years for anything.
This is an ever evolving industry, with millions of different combinations of hardware. Firmware updates are needed, and needed often.