I think we are confusing the perfect from the good enough.

If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.

Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".

Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.

I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.