I don't know why people are surprised by this. Using suitable off-the-shelf solutions for non-mission-critical purposes seems like a very reasonable thing to do.

I'm recalling this from my memory of "The Space Above Us" podcast: There were various bespoke teleprinters sent up on early shuttle flights that had exciting failure modes (if I remember correctly one of them started smoking) and in at least a couple of cases they had to stow the new hardware and pull out the old backup hardware because the new stuff didn't work.