I don’t think you can simply drop old blocks without burning someone’s savings?
No, but Monero is not a savings account, it is a currency, using it to store coins for over a decade is detrimental to those trying to use it for transactions by forcing everyone to keep old data around.
Wallets can simply notify users telling them to churn their coins into fresh blocks. Small inconvenience that will greatly benefit new users and those who use Monero everyday.
We would see 10 times the nodes on the network if the chain was only a few GB's and not growing, because just about anyone could run one.