You won't understand a thing, though. You already have the source code for Linux, Minix and tons of other OSes, pedagogical or otherwise. Why generate yet another that you won't understand?
How would unoptimized slop code be good for older hardware? That's what Linux and other projects are for. If you wanted to tinker and learn how operating systems work, you'd code one yourself like I did in CS classes. You'd actually learn something and you get the good feeling of having done it yourself.
I want to do that. Last week there was an article from a person that vibed their whole system in assembly and it was super fast and it did exactly what the person wanted and nothing else. That was eye opening.
Clearly a matter of opinion and circumstances. Plenty of people with effectively zero cost access to agents who see value in implementing an operating system from scratch. The team who made the demo for example, and those of us who see the possibilities the demo inspires for another example.
Because it would be sponsored by anthropic/google/openai? You cannot do it (typically) without paying for the tokens they only can offer. Programming used to be free, but slowly, we need to pay for every single line of code. It's sickening
Nobody has taken away the freedom to program like we used to. Punch cards may be more expensive now, but vim and emacs are still as free as they ever were.
Could be a good use for older hardware. Why not.