He probably owned a device capable or running a virtual machine which would be much more convenient to deal with.

Also this idea of "but what if I'll need this in the future", is a common theme among horders.

If hackers always chose the convenient option, that wouldn't make for very challenging or interesting projects ;)

There are probably thousands of regular VPS webservers out there.

If you have to modify the hardware. Checking pins, testing things, soldering… you might want to have backups.