In the context of using this to punch down at a non-profit I can see some reasons.
The non-profit was not named, so your abusive hyperbole is obvious.
The msg exposes a trend likely occuring at many tech shops by charities who have not figured out how to market pre-spychip machines and likely don’t even have the awareness to know what they are tossing which is being blindly scrapped on the simple basis of age alone.
OP is not a state level target,
As already pointed out, you need not be targeted by feds doing tailored ops:
The non profit is not concerned with OP being targeted by the US government, their goal is to provide serviceable computers to needy people.
This is a false dichotomy. Needy people should have security too. It also misses an important infosec principle: the principle of least privilege. If you don’t need an extra attack surface, it’s unwise to deploy it.
It’s surface level relevant to the zero waste conversation, but only if you don’t value anything but the old outdated PC.
Nonsense. Zero waste of hardware that serves a variety of purposes does not exclude any other zero waste practice.
Older processors like this have such bad processing efficiency that the energy savings alone would pay for a new SBC in a year, presuming heavy use.
How foolish of you to presume heavy use on an arbitrary unknown demographic of users.
Then there are the logistical costs and labor of managing that supply of old equipment.
Perhaps you are in a country where they just toss e-waste into a landfill. In more responsible parts of the world, the logistical costs and labor of properly dispensing the old e-waste is /higher/ than the cost of selling it to a buyer who will use it.
A few generations of architecture mean that peripheral and add-in cards are not available or wouldn’t work.
Blaming designed obsolescence on the older hardware when interoperability matters -- amusing, if you only knew that USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2 and that gigabit ethernet is backwards compatible with its predecessor. There is also an absurdity with refusing to buy something designed for upgrades on the basis of /something/ being incompatible, when in fact the new hardware is dispensing of older standards. New laptops are soldering in RAM and if the battery is not soldered in it’s not using standard replaceable cells but rather proprietary batteries that amount to designed obsolescence. Copious cheap old upgrades can be trivially acquired when chronic upgraders dispense of their old gear.
The street market is flooded with old RAM at dirt cheap prices. We don’t need factory new RAM to upgrade our gear.
A 2008 thinkpad is what I use today, after 18 years. The shit you are advocating now has little chance of being usable 18 years from now as the designed obsolescence has evolved and enshitification of products have become increasingly insideous.
The dwindling stock of donor equipment
There is no shortage. It’s the thesis in fact. So much donor equipment is coming in that they must be selective.
Apart from failing to grasp the infosec factor, by fixating on security likely as a not-so-ethical consumer yourself you missed the fact that some consumers simply oppose anti-consumer products even if they don’t give a rat’s ass about security. Individual non-corporate consumers are being pushed to buy products that were made for corps and work against their interests generally.