If you're in a situation where throwaway-hardware makes sense, you'll care how the throwing-away is actually done.

While not throwaway hardware, the company I work for destroys hard drives and other persistent memory devices before discarding computers. If the persistent memory device cannot be easily and reliably destroyed, the whole device is.

I bet journalists with sensitive information are far more thorough.

everything is net booted, with no HDDs (at least that was the plan, it wasnt my project)

destruction is rather fun actually, after wiping, memory/disk is removed and taken apart manually. lots of magnets to play with.

I suspect something that wipes out hardware many times without magnets would still be very safe. Only when it is decommisioned does it make sense to use physics to destroy it fully.

*USB booted