I will start to believe the "7 years of updates" promise for Pixel phones when the first model that was released with this promise is approximately 7.5 years old. At that point, I may begin to reconsider my opinion. I fell prey to Google marketing when they released the very first Pixel model - I spent an exorbitant amount of money on it, only to have it utterly abandoned and deprecated, with support and updates dropped just over a year later.
As in all things relating to anything stated by Google with respect to the privacy, availability or expected lifetime of a consumer product, the maxim is not even "trust but verify", it should be "distrust, watch carefully, and assume the worst".
As far as I can tell from contemporary sources, Pixel 1 launched with a promise of two years of major releases + one additional year of security updates [0]. This was in October 2016. They exceeded that, and actually did three years of major releases, and security updates for a couple of months longer than promised, with the last one in December 2019 [1].
Seems like they a) delivered more than initially promised, b) did not drop it just a year after release. How long a support period do you think they actually promised, and where did they promise it?
As in all things relating to anything stated by Google with respect to the privacy, availability or expected lifetime of a consumer product, the maxim is not even "trust but verify", it should be "distrust, watch carefully, and assume the worst".