I think it's a bit unfair to say "for aesthetic reasons".
The article says it's because projectionists are familiar with the Palm Pilot UI (because to them it's just another tool), and rather than get them to re-learn a different UI, they used emulation to provide the same familiar UI on newer hardware.
We (technology/digital experts) take for granted our level of comfort in sussing out how a new UI works.
I don't say it lightly. It's trivial to remove the process entirely. The whole point of this style of projection is that it's as much theatre as the theatre itself. It's kept, including the aesthetic of the Pilot device itself, purely for nostalgic decoration and little more!
I think this is basically similar to the tension between if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and the desire to improve (or if you like, recreate, iterate, etc) what exists.
They definitely did. My brother was happy to get my ibm branded palm pilot (WorkPad) because it would interface with serial obd-ii dongles. And the ice rink where my kiddo plays hockey has a scoreboard that was sold with a palm pilot to control it (someone in the beer league built replacement software for a PC when palm pilots became hard to source)
thats exactly why. It was a simple serial connection that could connect directly with other simple embedded systems. My local Lowes home store had a palm pilot that controlled their security system, and it was still in use just pre-COVID for exactly the same reason.
