This whole privileged port thing is an outdated convention from the time when Linux ran on mainframes. Depending on your use case, it can be perfectly fine to lower it. I have set to `net.ipvX.ip_unprivileged_port_start = 80` on my server so that I can run rootless containers without extra privileges and have them bind to ports 80 and up.
Nits: It's a Unix convention (not just Linux), and Unix traditionally ran on minicomputers (not mainframes). Mainframes had their own specialized OSes, although some could run Unix in a partition or virtual machine.
I've read that privileged ports was created as a trust model, so users connecting to a service using a privileged port would know that service was started by root on that server and therefore could be trusted. I always felt this was a bit wierd though, maybe I was missinformed, or maybe priviliged ports was already a thing and was just leveraged this way?