Apple has been highlighting this 64-bit transition to end users, starting with macOS 10.13.4 released in March of 2018.
Concern around these messages have been posted all over the macOS forums, too. These messages certainly encouraged app upgrades, some app migrations, and discouraged folks with 32-bit requirements from rushing a Catalina install.
But like anything else around here, a lot of folks are either running far older versions, or that ignored, or misunderstood, or otherwise clicked through those 32-bit app messages. (Run a forum search. There’ve been multiple postings a day on that 32- to 64-bit diagnostic. Lots of discussions.)
With developers, the 64-bit transition has been highlighted as the trend and the plan going back a ~decade, and with stronger warnings in the past five or so years. Apple required all new submissions to the Mac App Store be 64-bit ~two years ago.
Same app retirements and app updates happened with iOS its apps and its migration to 64-bit, too. Including app depreciation messages. The iOS requirement for submitting only 64-bit apps for the iOS App Store was announced in June of 2017, and was required with iOS 11 and later.
Developers of Mac apps that were somehow unaware of this 64-bit transition would have been receiving support reports of these diagnostics from their end-users too, with any usage of their apps on macOS 10.13.4 and later. That if the number if messages getting posted around here was any guide.
As for the hardware failures, that’s a problem or a gap or a bug in the diagnostics, bad hardware, bad spare parts, or a bad repair.
With repeated failed repairs, any Mac is generally headed for a wholesale swap.
In general and with rare exceptions, software doesn’t break hardware. Software can expose latent issues. Marginal electrical connections, hard disks or SSDs reaching their lifetimes and limits, marginal or plugged-up cooling, etc.
Interestingly, out-of-spec output from graphics drivers are among of the few cases that I’ve seen software damage hardware, but I’d not expect to find an Apple driver that’s incorrectly configured and out-of-spec for an Apple graphics display. And I’d not assume that was the case here, though Apple should or will have failure-tracking and trending statistics that will flag this, if an issue here was released and shipped. And it’d be tied to specific hardware configurations, if this arises. And I do not know and would not expect this to have been the case here. An isolated hardware problem is far more likely.
Folks have long had difficulty with correlation and causality; the former does not imply the later.
