You would think that because of that, people would melt them down when they became no longer useful as currency.

The […] Is doing some heavy lifting.

That’s like saying that “I hope the black people that killed my parents suffer greatly” shouldn’t be said. You can’t just " I hope […] black people […] suffer greatly" it.

Nowadays reliability and coverage is actually the selling point.

They may all have enough speed, but usually the expensive ISPs are more reliable. Mostly because the "cheap ISP"s are just the expensive ones in a trenchcoat selling excess bandwidth. But when the excess bandwidth is no longer excess, the cheap ones are the first to be cut off.

So if you don’t need 99.99…% uptime, the cheap ones are much better.

I’d bet if you were a lego fan you’d say the same about legos.

Housing and concerts are orders of magnitude apart in “importantness”. All of the items above are not needed to live. A home is needed.