I’m personally really happy people are interested enough to both try installing old operating systems using old hardware and blog about it!

This series of posts highlights one of the features of Debian that's occasionally handy: you can usually upgrade between major stable releases in an automated way.

It can be good for workstation laptops, and for pets-not-cattle servers.

Stability for a couple years, then in-place upgrade to newer versions of things all at once. Whenever the timing is good for you (because you can keep using `oldstable` for a long time, with security updates).

Whether this upgrading incrementally keeps working smoothly for decades, I haven't read all of OP's posts to find out. But I've had machines running well after a few major upgrades, and even moving the HDD/SSD between upgraded laptop hardware.