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I think marketing of recent products is party responsible. With every new camera that comes out, or every sensor, lens, whatever it may be, the ones that came before it are automatically said to be obsolete. Professionals might feel especially threatened by this, as they need to keep up with their competitors.
This is exactly the reason why I wouldn't want to make photography my profession. You can't rush art. It's also why I shoot film. Light itself doesn't get upgrades every single year. The only thing you could do that would be similar to keeping up with new sensors per se, is to move up in film size, but that also has drawbacks (portability mainly), so there really isn't any reason to hoard equipment when you shoot film.
Sure you could hoard lenses, but I'd argue that that actually just leads to more options for you as a photographer, so there's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't really distract you from taking photos (in my experience), but rather it opens up new paths to take, new ways to experiment.
One can look at a film photo from 20 years ago and another from yesterday and not tell the difference, quality wise. But compare a digital photo taken with a recent, and a 20 year old digital camera, and the difference is obvious. Digital gets old really fast, and because most photographers use it, there's a real incentive to keep upgrading, it's just that they forget to take photos in the meantime.
