Otoh, the old Windows driver still works perfectly fine on modern Windows while there just never was a Linux driver for my obscure Elan touchpad, so I can't even source an old driver.

Recently I revived an old x86 netbook to see what I can still do with it when I put Linux on it and was negatively surprised how dead the 32-bit Linux experience is. Most distros are dropping 32bit now, with only some purpose-made old-device distros like Antix still supporting it, but also most apps have dropped 32bit years ago.

And while 32bit is old, it's not exactly obscure.