I was a teaching assistant for freshman physics lab while in grad school, almost 40 years ago. My co-teachers were all theoreticians, so I bore the brunt of helping the students troubleshoot their setups.

There's a balance that has to be struck between: 1) Equipment that's so perfect that students learn nothing about the effort to get an experiment working. 2) Or so crappy that it's an obstacle to learning anything at all.

Also, the crappy-ness is multiplied by 30 for the number of setups needed for a class of 60 students, assuming they work in pairs.

Oh, the crappy oscilloscopes. They were cheap "student scopes" and their controls were worn out, so they behaved erratically. Since then I've met other people who took freshman physics lab, and they remember the "oscilloscope lab" with disgust.