As for Slashdot, I haven't seen this site receive a major update for over a decade. The original version used to be a mess of Perl. I imagine these days it's a mess of Perl and some other stuff with some very fragile scripts that can't cope very well or consistently with different character encodings let alone being UTF-8 end to end. Using a subset of HTML as markup probably doesn't help either.
I could see this also being very useful for people wanting to flash embedded devices from cloud based software. But it could also be used to drive braille readers, point of sale terminals and anything else that works over serial.
Basically I wouldn't trust any product to be lifetime unless the entirety of the software can be downloaded with its own license key and continues to work regardless of what happens to the company.
Overdrawn? But I still have checks left!