If I'm reading this correctly (and you need to read between the lines a bit), it's not that they literally don't work, it's that they aren't capable of getting security updates. For playing Minecraft, who cares, but schools are legally obligated to keep private student information (like all their schoolwork) secure.

It's not like there's a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.

This is just a shit sandwich all around.

From another perspective, several schools I've worked at have had so much vandalism and theft of Chromebooks that they won't even consider replacing them with more costly future-proof tech. It doesn't matter if they get 8 years of software support if students break most of them in years 1-3.