I think you're pretty much hitting the nail on the head there. I don't doubt that there are museums out there which do a good job on the preservation front -- but many I've encountered act as 'black holes' where rare artefacts go to never be seen or heard of again.
I've seen and heard horror stories of rare machines being destroyed because the CMOS or PRAM batteries were left in place while they were stored -- no reasonably clued-up collector is going to make that mistake. But some of these museums tie themselves in "Ship of Theseus" style knots by obsessing over keeping the original, dead batteries at the cost of losing the whole machine.
The best thing that's happened for software preservation is people uploading random disk images to archive.org...!
I've seen and heard horror stories of rare machines being destroyed because the CMOS or PRAM batteries were left in place while they were stored -- no reasonably clued-up collector is going to make that mistake. But some of these museums tie themselves in "Ship of Theseus" style knots by obsessing over keeping the original, dead batteries at the cost of losing the whole machine.
The best thing that's happened for software preservation is people uploading random disk images to archive.org...!