Requiring a support contract to receive continuing updates of software that was very publicly approaching end of support, with published EoL dates for years now does not break any laws.
By that logic, no support contracts are legal in the EU at all, and no product would ever be sunset.
You can try to see if
lspci
sees the USB controller. Next I would try running diagnostics from UEFI, see if you get any errors. Try a bootable USB to verify if it’s a hardware or software issue.Any hardware diagnostic failure or failure to boot from it will tell you you need a new system board.