Can the machines not be reconfigured to support / mine / sustain any other blockchain technologies ?
You can mine testnet Bitcoins. They are
supposed to be worthless though.
who knows about the future, right?

No, someone attempted to monetise these in the past and a number of changes were made to testnet to make it worthless to prevent people mining testnet into oblivion making it impossible to test anything on it. You can reset testnet difficulty to 1, and the testnet blockchain is not set in stone, it can be reset to a new genesis block. There's a reason it's called "test"net. It's for testing changes easily, not to make it another worthless piece of shit altcoin that someone tries to make money off.