It's not better when it comes at the cost of taking some of those handles away from people that were using them.

But they weren't using them. That's the whole point.

@pg hasn't posted on HN for two years. Can I have his username?

@pg is paying for the servers

But he does not need the account name, right?

However, Aaron Swartz is not paying for reddit servers anymore, can I have u/AaronSw then? Has been inactive for 10 years.

You can't claim reddit usernames but you can claim inactive Subreddits by contacting the mods.

There are a number of situations I'm personally aware of where users had usernames revoked for channels they were actively using.

One common case where this occurred is when users used a channel as a "bio" or "blog", and posted to the channel infrequently to update it.