At the very least the support requirement is a soft one, not a hard one. A large portion of motherboards from that era had firmware updates to officially support Win11, and Win11 WILL work on an i7-7700k even though its not in the list. You unfortunately won't get it through Windows update and will have to install the hard way.
And if there's problems, you'll be sorry out of luck.
Pisses me off, but at least it's not a complete blocker.
Ok, if that's true, I'm back to raging about how absolutely ridiculous this is. Why obsolete a computer that can still run almost anything on high-ish settings @.@ Because there's 0.01% more crash or whatever....
I’m speculating it was supposed to let them drop Meltdown patches. Doing so easily creates “20% performance gain over Windows 10 on same machine”. Aligns with the statement that they “block” “security” updates.
But this is clearly coming from someone who’s not actively in coding role and without consultation with developers, as some of CPUs(namely Ryzen 2k) to be supported don’t have the required but not very well debugged features(MBEC for Zen 2 - Ryzen 3k and up with luck).
And if there's problems, you'll be sorry out of luck.
Pisses me off, but at least it's not a complete blocker.