Yes it is rare to see transaction still left in mempool for almost 1-2 years but it is much possible either by the user himself rebroadcasting it regularly and the fee as stated above or the wallet used as an inbuilt rebroadcast which it does regularly.
It doesn't even need to be rebroadcast for some nodes to keep it for a year of more.
We know for a fact there are some nodes which run with much higher limits than the default. If you look at
https://mempool.space/ for example, their node is showing over 1 GB of memory use, far beyond the 300 MB default, and the graph is still showing all transactions down to 1 sats/vbyte. If you look at
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1w,weight,0, his node is keeping all transactions, even those paying less than 1 sat/vbyte in fees. There will be many other such nodes which will hold on to OP's transaction indefinitely.
Still, his transaction pays 12 sats/vbyte, so it won't take a year for fees to drop back down to that level.
I agree that it wouldn’t take a year and the OP was just being sarcastic and was met with some sarcastic replies as well but, my point of wonder is,
Why send such small, dust amount. It’s hardly of any relevance or perhaps it’s requested to clear error IP on forum account creation. I wonder if that’s it else, why the dust amount and at such a time when, you even have to give it some hours for transactions of 100sat/vbyte to confirm and yet here you are @OP with 12sat/vbyte.
Does it really make much difference @o_e_I_e_o, having your transactions listed at the bottom of some of the pools and getting dropped. In both cases, you get to wait until the network is decongested and fees reduced.
I feel, your more relaxed having your transaction, dropped/rejected and stayed in your wallet.