I built my own PC years ago and it came without a tpm so I can't upgrade. The motherboard does have the plug for a tpm so I bought a cheap one and tried plugging it in. Windows still doesn't recognize it. I did my best but the obsoleting Microsoft is doing here is heavy handed
How old is your PC? My 10 years old laptop has a TPM built into the CPU (Intel PTT), which Windows 11 is perfectly happy about once I figured out how to enable it in the boot options.
+1 to being really really sceptical of anyone claiming to have a 10 year old system that supports it. Skylake is literally well known for not supporting TPM 2.0 and the i7-6700K is still considered reasonably high end by todays standards (tech hasn't moved fast in the past decade and the 14nm Skylakes aren't that far off the 14nm+++++ high end variants Intel sells today).
The first draft of TPM 2.0 was 2015. The finalized version was Nov 2019. Intel 8th gen and above do have the option to upgrade to TPM 2.0 via a firmware update but as you point out those CPUs are not 10 years old.
That's one of the problems with this TPM 2.0 requirement. Tech has not moved fast in the past decade and the requirement is asking people to throw away 10 year old systems that can still easily beat today's midrange lineup.
I think what OP may be experiencing is that Windows 11 does install on older TPM 1.x hardware. It just nags to upgrade the hardware to TPM 2.0.
I went and checked now, and your timeline seems way off. According to https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/resource/tpm-library-speci... the first draft of TPM 2.0 was in 2013 not 2015, and the first "non-draft" version was in 2014 not 2019. It does make sense, revision 1.16 of TPM 2.0 does predate my CPU.
(I'm not seeing any "nags" anywhere, I don't know where that would be?)
Edit: I just noticed that that page is the same that was linked from the article. Yet it still contains the block that the article claims has been removed. Did they put it back in again?
Edit 2: Or I do have TPM 2.0? It seems to think that I do:
So yes, this is TPM 2.0. And TPM 2.0 was released in a non-draft version at the time my CPU was made. And the "1.16" is the revision number of the TPM 2.0 specification that it supports.
The PC Health check app says it's not supported, but the installer doesn't complain. I don't know if it would have allowed me to update automatically, but it works when using the ISO.