i am incredibly confused by what you mean, Microsoft’s website clearly states the extended end of supoort for 7 was jan 2020 as stated here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-7, and besides, the marketshare for windows 7 was still growing in 2012

by any chance, do you mean a push over to windows 7 from something like xp? or are you talking about a push from 7 to 8, which never really happened as all the focus was on the impending 2014 windows xp end of support date

windows 7 reached extended eol in 2020, for security updates only, i believe that’s what they were talking about

technically that is only true if the malware in question does something in the kernel or relies on an unimplemented wine api call, since a lot of malware is an infostealer or ransomware, its quite likely that it’ll work just fine under wine