From some camera suppliers, Fuji and Panasonic are good examples, I'm mostly certain that firmware upgrades are part of their policies to make customers satisfied. Those two companies at least have apparently decided that customer satisfaction is vital for their long term survival. With some other companies, not necessarily in the photography industry, I get a feeling that firmware and software upgrades are parts of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), the scheme that IBM refined to perfection to convince customers that buying products from competitors like Amdahl (mainframe computers) and Memorex (disk drives etc.) was a certain path towards a sudden and very unpleasant death.
I recently bought a Mac Pro 4,1. I bought it because the previous generation of Mac Pro computers seem to be indestructable and because more or less every component can be replaced and/or upgraded. This is a concept that Apple now seems to have left. The machine comes with a caveat though: As opposed to the last of the great Mac Pro models, the 5,1 that can be upgraded to at least High Sierra (10.13), the 4,1 can only be upgraded to El Capitan (10.11) unless I install a third party patch (High Sierra Patcher). For that reason, among others, the 5,1 is much more expensive second hand.
Currently, running El Capitan is not a problem, since Adobe CC 2017 runs under that version. In theory I can run CC 2017 forever and stay happy without patches and/or upgrades. However, if 15 years or so in the future I decide to (or have to) upgrade to a camera that is not supported by CC 2017, and I have to upgrade to something like CC 2032, which will probably not run under El Capitan, then a third party patch which works today, but maybe not with some future upgrade from Apple, will become a necessity.
Or I can simply do what Apple wants me to; buy the new iMac Pro, a machine that can't be upgraded or re-configured and hardly be serviced. That's what FUD makes people do.
We're back to the dying polar bear. In a world that drowns in garbage and pollution, one of the world's leading makers of computer devices goes from making relatively sustainable products that can be upgraded, serviced and re-configured, products with a long life, to products that are designed to die without any way of upgrading or repairing them available unless you go to more or less home made solutions that may or may not work.
It obstructs my work and my lifestyle, and it's unethical. Can we trust the suppliers of our gear to prioritise what their customers need, and no tleast the environment, above the short time profitability of the company? With some suppliers, the answer to that is a very clear "no". This is one of the reasons why I will never own an iPhone.