Let's say the IoT existed in 1994 & you bought a new Kenmore IoT fridge running Linux 1.x. Fast forward to 2014--who today is doing anything with the Linux 1.x kernel? Nobody--including Kenmore support engineers.
In 1998, I purchased a computer running Windows. Shortly afterwards, I installed Linux 2.2 and a webserver on it. Strangely enough, the computer is still working, is running a modern kernel with full support for the hardware, and somehow managed to avoid being pwned at any point in the intervening 15 years.
The nice thing about open-source software is that you generally don't need to run obsolete software on ancient hardware. That Kenmore IoT fridge would probably run a Linux 3.x kernel without problems, as long as the software was genuinely open-sourced.