This reminds me of a conversation I had with an archivist acquaintance I met at a conference. Her opinion was that I should donate my personally acrued private assemblage of retrocomputing game systems and personal computers to the Living Computer Museum, out of the belief that they'd be under better care there than in the hands of a private collector.
While LCM volunteers may have a keen interest in preservation, I don't feel there's the same sense of ownership as systems literally brought back to life/restored by the hand of the person who purchased them expressly for the purpose of sharing those experiences.
I think you're pretty much hitting the nail on the head there. I don't doubt that there are museums out there which do a good job on the preservation front -- but many I've encountered act as 'black holes' where rare artefacts go to never be seen or heard of again.
I've seen and heard horror stories of rare machines being destroyed because the CMOS or PRAM batteries were left in place while they were stored -- no reasonably clued-up collector is going to make that mistake. But some of these museums tie themselves in "Ship of Theseus" style knots by obsessing over keeping the original, dead batteries at the cost of losing the whole machine.
The best thing that's happened for software preservation is people uploading random disk images to archive.org...!
While LCM volunteers may have a keen interest in preservation, I don't feel there's the same sense of ownership as systems literally brought back to life/restored by the hand of the person who purchased them expressly for the purpose of sharing those experiences.