I guess you're unaware of the gargantuan number of legacy manufacturing plants littered all over the globe that are trying to retrofit current tech over 40+ year old tech while it is still operating. Think 2nd and 3rd world manufacturing; far larger than you probably imagine.

Exactly, I use to think the same thing! Many legacy system, the industrial machines that run factories, infrastructure, etc. all have hundreds of gauges and some of them do get "watched". Cost of digitization via smart gauges just cost too much and planning that goes into replacing them often isn't tenable. So many instrument readings don't get logged - until some machine fails. There are systems out there, but they aren't affordable to make a broad impact - I hope we can progress to change that.

Its very common for plant operators to do 'rounds' and inspect gauges that are not digital because they are not usually terribly important, because the gauge provides a backup to the electronic reading, etc.

Put this on a 'spot' robot from Boston dynamics and you have an operator that won't be hurt when there is a steam leak, or whatever.

There are definitely use cases.

I recall there was a project integrating utility meters into Home Assistant, where a tiny ESP board with on-device ML used a camera to read the analog gauge, basically the most practical solution given you can't replace or modify your utility meter and only a handful offer a serial port.