The article doesn't go into detail about it, but if you go to eBay and find a really old Dell rack server that that does use DDR3 ECC Registered (such as an R910 or R920 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Or like an R720 with 256 or 512GB in it. Also major price jump in resale value. That's what we have come to now.

Yeah but TBH an old server with DDR3 ECC is still way sufficient to serve something like 99.9% of all the servers out there's jobs.

That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB.

These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty.

And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills.

We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.