This is a large scam and we are curious to see what will happen. If they aren't sued, fined, imprisoned, court-ordered, or otherwise dealt justice it means something very toxic for tech as an industry. And if they are the drama will be fun.

You may as well ask "why do people like sports?", people are emotionally invested and that is enough.

Being a bad product or poorly engineered doesn't make something a "scam". There is an actual real NFT scam in this story before Rabbit though if you dig.

They lied, they promised X and delivered Y. That is a scam.

To expand on this, this isn't just a truth stretching. They didn't deliver X-1, they delivered rubbish. This isn't a tire that self heals small holes but doesn't live up to the commercial, this isn't another energy drink promising 5 hours of alertness and giving you caffeine jitters. These devices are just garbage, these are like essential oils or magic crystals promising to cure a disease or otherwise perform and simply not. They promised categories of features and faked demos so they knew it couldn't do X when they sold it.

But even worse, this device cannot do anything useful. This can't do A through W, I will grant it Y and Z because it boots and doesn't catch fire.

But even worse, this device tracks way too much and that might be leaked harming you.

There is no coherent way to claim this is not a scam in every sense of the word. And coming from people who committed other scams doesn't make this not one by comparison.

Good luck proving it in court. (It is not that I disagree with you).

See the other comment about data harvesting

Because there are sometimes interesting things that get thrown in the garbage. The author clearly doesn't care about the product as a product (otherwise they'd have bought one new, and this article would be completely different), they care about it as a technical puzzle, with secrets to uncover.

Reverse engineering is often interesting independently of whether the actual device was interesting.

I find the ways in which things work less interesting than the ways in which they do not.

Why do people care what others care about?

There is usually something important to learn from other people's failings

Because hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into this industry, and this seems to be the best result we’ve gotten for all that money.

Possibly useful hardware components or package for cheap.

as opposed to the other millions of smartphone and tablets for just as much if not cheaper with most of it being thrown in the trash due to it being >5 years old?