I flip items all the time, but they are items that very few people want, so I'm providing a service to the few people who need the things that I sell. If anybody needs any vintage vacuum tubes, I have several hundred. I have a Pentium III laptop. Good luck finding these things out in the wild if you're looking for them.
Some need an actual old hardware for research, for improving emulators, for testing compatibility, for porting specific software. I would guess it may have more uses, but those are ones I know of. And for display in a museum, too
NASA needed 8086 chips till they retired the shuttle. They were paying good $$$ for the things as well. Dunno if anyone would need those things anymore at this point.