You should ask them again. Most companies just fear the ways the storage drive could be restored. Maybe they gave them away without the storage.
A couple of years ago we gave old core2duo out for free. I prepared them with dd'ing only /dev/zero over the storage. Should be enough, but replacing would be better.
This works in a private network you own. But my remote system is at work. I can not use it with full automatic login. Hell it's even encrypted and has a BIOS PW.
I would support this, but Wayland always lacks support for remote. I have to switch to x11 if I want to work on it via teamviewer (past) or rustdesk (present).
So bad again? I should stop using english.