To the extent the hardware has aged but will still serve the people receiving it, and to the extent they’re more comfortable jumping through the smaller hoops to run familiar software than the larger hoops of vast complexity of a new OS, projects like this are wonderful. That’s why.
These machines are still plenty useful as long as you steer clear of certain unnecessarily heavy chunks of the web and run native apps.
One notable aspect of laptops that's improved in the past decade-plus is multitouch trackpads. I have a 2013 Ivy Bridge laptop with "two-touch" tracking (the Linux kernel calls it Elan V3), but the multi-finger detection is deeply broken (a second finger will register at the wrong point if you tap lightly or near the edge, the two points tend to be displaced towards the same X or Y position if they're close but not identical along either axis, and both reported finger points tend to be displaced away from the actual touch point towards periodic quantized Y and probably X positions). I use it with edge scrolling, but that struggles too because the touchpad is bad at sensing touches right up against the edge, it's hard to even feel the edge with my finger, and the Linux kernel has a bug that halves the size it thinks the touchpad is (which I had to patch locally and rebuild the psmouse kernel module on every kernel update). I think MacBooks were ahead of PC laptops because they reused multitouch tech from iPhones, which Apple initially purchased from FingerWorks.
One notable regression is a decrease in modularity, ease of disassembly, and repairability, caused by the rise of integrated keyboards into palmrests, nonremovable batteries (at least modern CPUs are more efficient), soldered RAM, now even soldered storage, in the pursuit of slimness and planned obsolescence.