The comments on this type of article are always frustrating speculation, parent comment included. There are more modern radiation tolerant processors available but JPL also has 20 years of hardware and software heritage. If it works, don't fix it. It could take 10s of person-years for software updates alone, which will always add some risk too. For the payloads and non-mission-critical components on the rover, there is a ton of stuff used that is no particularly radiation tolerant.

Good idea to use modern cell phone hardware but you could have googled it. That's exactly what they did in this very mission, for the helicopter. It uses a qualcomm snapdragon processor. In fact NASA uses a ton of off the shelf hardware and maintains a database of testing results. In this case it's an experimental payload so they relax the requirements rather than try and make it truly radiation tolerant.

For landing, which has high image processing requirements, but only for a very short time (therefore low risk to fail), an Intel Atom CPU, USB, ethernet and an SSD was used.

And NASA CLPS program is $2.6B, awarded to commercial companies for lunar exploration. They don't give any requirements except "take this stuff to the moon." Companies are free to propose anything, and the idea is that 15/20 companies (or so) will fail and 5 will stumble upon cheaper solutions.

What is radiation tolerance anyway? It's not just a matter of "changing the packaging" or "adding lead". It's normally achieved by a combination of screening products, redundancy (can be hot or cold, double or triple, etc), mitigation like overcurrent detection, and shielding. You can't just add lead, not only is it extra mass, secondary particles will be generated when radiation hits it. It turns out aluminum is normally more mass efficient than lead, and some plastics even more so. But it depends where you are and what the radiation environment is.

This is beyond niche and solved by access policy. What OP is describing only describes a way to make a weird, less secure (more attack surface area) edge case for the IT department to deal with.

I doubt this will happen, since time and again, Paul's definition of freedom in this case is freedom for the ISPs to do whatever they want. Net neutrality requires regulation, but what will actually happen under this type of plan is deregulation.