I know people who trust older Ledger models more, such as the Ledger Nano S (not the plus model) that doesn't have ledger recover, but support, updates, and newly developed features are no longer the company's focus on this device.
Right. Ledger has stated that they will continue patch security issues and discovered vulnerabilities even for the old Nano S. At the same time, they haven't released a new firmware upgrade since 2021 for it. The crypto apps are universal and can be installed on all Ledger devices.
People make the mistake of thinking "doesn't support" means "doesn't contain any of the code or vulnerabilities."
The code is closed source. Even though the original Nano S doesn't support Ledger Recover, it doesn't mean the firmware doesn't contain any of the code that enables at least some form of internet access even if it's not supported.
We will never know because there is no publicly available code to inspect. But if key extraction code is present on Ledger Nano S, it could have been added in 2021 at the latest. That's when the most recent firmware version for this model came out. Ledger Recover wasn't around at the time, but again, we will never know if they already worked on something like that back in 2020-2021. Besides, Ledger Recover is certainly not the result of 10 days of work.