> not sure about the strategies here but maybe a better approach would be to kill support for unsupported version of windows in a major release

We do, but the "major" release is the second field of the version number (you can think of the first field as the "series" or "product" number).

Yes, this is not SemVer. Sorry. We pre-date SemVer.

Python 3.8 and earlier are just as supported for Windows 7 as our volunteers can handle, which is all that has ever been offered here. If people need better support than that, I'd suggest paying someone.