I see the same being completely viable for farming equipment. In fact it's something that countries should mandate for new equipment to stop all the lock-in bullshit.
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.
With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once build a nuclear balm?