Same happened to my work computer about 2 years ago. The i5 was “too old”. Work tossed the laptop and bought a new one. I asked the IT manager if I could buy the old i5 from them, he just gave it to me, since it was already written off (no HDD, though). It’s running Linux now on an SSD, is fully updated, and still runs faster than the i9 on nvme they replaced it with to run win11. Win-win in this scenario, I guess.