I use older laptops every day. The main computer I use is an 8 year old laptop. The following are some of the issues I encounter.
- Reduced battery life.
- Dead batteries, including CMOS batteries.
- Running hot. I clean out the air vents with an air compressor to blow away the accumulated dust and occasionally need to reapply thermal paste.
- Lack of USB 3.0 ports.
- Sticky surfaces. Some old laptops (but fortunately not many) have a rubber coating that deteriorates and becomes sticky with age.
I'm dealing with quite a range of older laptops, as I regularly buy and sell them. For the most part, I find the lack of driver updates to only rarely be an issue. I own two 14 year old laptops that have major video glitches after I upgraded them build 2004 of Windows 10, but had no such issues with previous builds. But other than that, I rarely have issues. The potential lack of recent drivers, usually does not matter. Unless you are experiencing device issues, it doesn't matter if you don't have recent drivers. For older devices, for which there are no Windows 10 drivers available, usually Windows 7 drivers will work just fine. I say this as someone who is very regularly doing clean installs of Windows 10 on older systems.
As well as that, some older hardware still continues to receive driver updates. As an example, on the 8 year old laptop I'm typing this on, the Realtek network and audio drivers are just 4 months old. While the drivers provided by the laptop manufacturer are from 2018 for the network driver and 2013 for the audio driver, Realtek themselves continues to release new drivers. Just bear in mind that while your computer manufacturer will most likely only provide driver updates for a short period of time, after that you will still be able to find more recent drivers online, e.g. from the websites of the actual device manufacturers, or by using driver update software.