Just a guess but they may be for the truly paranoid as they are the last from Intel without the ME black-box, and with a lean Linux (e.g. Void, or my new beau Chimera-Linux) probably work better than you’d think.
(and Now I’m thinking of digging out my old MacBook Pro 2,2 to see what’s what)
I know, I also use lean LInxues, but JS heavy websites and productivity apps will still be slower compared to modern machines, no matter what Linux distro you use, especially if you multitask a lot.
Void Linux won't give your machine more GHz or TFLOPs or turn your HDD into a NVME, it'll just reduce the RAM and storage footprint compare to more feature rich distros, but your CPU performance in all tasks will stay the same.
My old Macbook, has 2x2.2 GHz 64-bit procs and one of the OG Intel SSDs to replace the HDD – given it’s only sata3 but I have a suspicion it’s still good.
I think I actually will revive it this weekend just to see for myself, all else fails it has a great big matte screen and excellent keyboard I could use for distraction free writing.
(and Now I’m thinking of digging out my old MacBook Pro 2,2 to see what’s what)