That is hard to hear, given how unacceptable it seems to us to waste this hardware, but it's frustratingly true. Lots of devices have been made and EOLd which had reusability potential after that happened, devices which nobody went to much trouble to lock down, and yet we all know 99% of them went in the landfill anyway. Even the ones 'hacked' will probably go in the landfill anyway, just a couple years later. Unless we really believe that those of us nerds who reflash them, are truly using those devices as a substitute for some new gadget we would have purchased. Somehow I doubt this is usually true.

As an example, how many old hacked Wii consoles are being actively used today in a way that makes us genuinely believe that someone is using it as a substitute for a new gaming console? And that sucker, by the time all of its official support ended, was so simple to hack that I think it's equivalent to an officially unlocked bootloader.

The possibility to root the device would give non-nerd owners the possibility to sell their devices to some nerds that want to play with it instead of binning it directly.