I can understand running an old 486 machine for nostalgia reasons, or because you have some old industrial equipment that relies on it and even one second spent replacing it is a second too many, but I struggle to imagine why you'd want or need to run a modern Linux kernel on it.

>This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007

That's really long compared to 1yr refresh cycles we have today with phones etc.