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Many laptops from last few years have soldered memory. Your previous laptop's SSD can also be reused, since those don't die that quickly compared to the laptop.

In a lot of cases, owners remove the storage not because it has any value but rather they don't want to risk making a mistake letting a device go that still has data on it.

Also pulling and shredding hard drives is cheaper than paying someone to run DBAN or equivalent (which can take many hours to complete on a large drive), and there's no easy way to securely erase an SSD if it wasn't encrypted from the beginning.

Or worse, they have memory and SSD soldered on board, and are broken, so you have to learn soldering skills too.

Damn really? One of my go to moves when helping small political campaigns is to buy like a 2015 MBP and turn it into a locally hosted server to run all their stuff on the cheap.

Older MacBooks with socketed storage may actually be exempted because they use a proprietary connector instead of standard m.2.