I’ve never felt silicon degradation on a CPU. But I can say that I’ve had a GPU with a stable overclock for years that started getting a bit flakey and I had to go back to stock settings. Of course for GPUs there are also more frequent driver updates. Maybe that effect was due to the driver and games also trying to squeeze more out of the hardware.
While this is true to some extent and newer OSes often come with more resource intensive features. The OS kernels tend to stay light and backwards compatible. There are loads of modern Linux distros that will still run on a pentium 4. It would take extra optimization effort and removal of bloatware from the vendors. And this wouldn’t result in more sales. At best it gets the some brand loyalty.
You won’t get much use out of a 1060 for AI. Maybe some toy models to learn but even then you might run into limitations with the older CUDA version