Comment by lucb1e
It's kinda good they use such old systems, as the vast majority of pollution occurs during manufacturing of devices since we usually use them only a handful of years. Iirc the break-even point was somewhere around 25 years, as in, upgrading for energy efficiency then becomes worth it (source: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...). 15 goes a long way towards that!
On the other hand, I didn't dig very deep into the ticket history now but it sounds like this could have been expected: it broke once already 4 years ago (2021), so maybe planning an upgrade for when this happens again would be good foresight. Then again, volunteers... It's not like I picked up the work as an f-droid user either
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think you may be misreading the "Emissions from production of computational resources" section of that link.
It says for servers that 13-21 years is the break even for emissions from production vs consumption.
The 25 year number is for consumer devices like phones and laptops.
I would also argue that average load on the servers comes into play.