$20 for one of the best laptops money could buy 20 years ago: is it worth it?

That’s what BSD is for. I found a G3 Macbook on the street in very good condition and OpenBSD was the only distro I could find that still has official support for that architecture. A lot of ports won’t compile for it any more — it’s near-useless as a general-purpose laptop, but for a lot of specific use cases it does just fine. I imagine they’ll hang on to 32-bit x86 support even longer than old PowerPC.