I believe they are referring to the dumpster support model. The hardware is so cheap that, if it fails, you toss it in a dumpster and buy more by the gross. Using Kubernetes to spread loads across your less reliable nodes ensures high availability. Sometimes this can be even more reliable because you are regularly testing your recovery and backup features and your hardware is more varied.

The downside is that if some piece of firmware or hardware has a vulnerability you have a larger attack surface.

There's a ton of out-of-support enterprise gear racked up in data centers. It can be done if you have a plan to handle failures.

But that's still a lot easier than managing laptops, which are unwieldily in a DC for a lot of other reasons.

We didn't have support, and we didn't need it, as the hardware was essentially EOL, probably would've been sold for like 20% of new price. We just chucked Selenium grid on them, locked them in the storage room, and if they died, they died (they didn't die a lot tho, which is surprising, as we had quite a few cheap sketchy in there as well)

Seems like they'd have to find another 5 year old Thinkpad.