I still have a 2012 Air. It's on its second battery, which is shot, but until recently everything else worked. Unfortunately the mic has mostly stopped working as of late. Still, we got a lot of use out of that thing, and my kids still use it--just can't use it for video conf any more.
Exactly, it's great to hand things down to family like that. And with the 2016+ laptops, with these known issues, its quite possible it just becomes ewaste with an expensive repair that you can't do yourself at home
The 11" MBA was my favourite laptop ever. Powerful enough to do full development workloads, small enough to take anywhere.