You couldn't be more off-base in that opinion. Now there's nothing with a ROM in it that can't be understood and brought back to life. Data formats, communication protocols, and command languages that were poorly documented or completely undocumented can now be reverse-engineered and put back to work, to say nothing of license keys that haven't been issued by the manufacturer for 20+ years.

I'm part of a group of collectors/users of HP and Tektronix test gear from the same eras that the retrocomputing fans are typically focused on, and LLM-guided ROM disassembly has already solved some longstanding (if admittedly obscure) problems in our community.