Nah, if I ever heard that BS coming from Intel, I would call it out in a heartbeat. Storage is ridiculously cheap. Seriously, what's a few TB of archived drivers and software? A consumer could afford the storage to maintain that. Non-automated downloads should be few and far between, so bandwidth costs can't be that big of an issue.
The only rationale I can come up with is, "we're tired of maintaining links to this stuff." IMO, a static "legacy.intel.com" would serve just fine. Give it an HTML 3.0 interface, and only touch it when new material is moved in to the "too old to matter anymore" bin. I don't care. If you moved the entire host onto a cloud provider, it would cost peanuts to keep online as a "best-effort" project.
There is no reasonable excuse for this, particularly from a company that has a track record of selling its legacy cores to industrial manufacturers for decades past when anyone thought it had market viability anymore.