My original comment in the thread:

> A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.

It's good that Automattic is doing it, I was wishing it was an industry standard procedure, for all past-end-of-life hardware, not just layoffs and not just laptops.

Right now FAANG, for example, which you'd expect to have the very best of everything, as far as I know don't give old laptops (and other old hardware) to employees, they don't even sell them. They send them to be recycled or whatever, but the best action is to reduce and reuse, recycle should be the last option.

Plus an employee is likely to be willing to accept their old device since they know it's performance and general behavior.