Canada

It is honestly a marvel how you can type so many words while fundamentally misunderstanding the basic vocabulary you are trying to use. You literally just made up your own personal definition of a sunk cost fallacy to try and save face here. A sunk cost in economics is simply any money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered regardless of whether the investment was profitable yesterday or five years ago. The fallacy is letting the emotional weight of that unrecoverable past expense dictate your future business decisions instead of looking at the current marginal utility of the asset. If a production line stops being profitable but management refuses to scrap it because they are obsessed with the original purchase price they are actively committing the sunk cost fallacy. It does not magically stop being a sunk cost just because the machine successfully printed money for a few years before the market dried up.

And desperately dragging the concept of equity into this just proves you have entirely lost the plot of your own argument. Equity is the current market value of an asset minus liabilities. You literally just spent three entire comments screaming that these manufacturing machines are entirely task specific and cannot possibly be used for anything else. If a machine can only make a product that nobody wants to buy anymore its current market value is essentially the price of scrap metal. You cannot confidently claim an asset is completely useless for any other purpose and then turn around and cry about its massive retained equity. Either the machine has alternative market value and the company can liquidate it to fund a transition or it is a completely unrecoverable sunk cost that rational management needs to write off immediately. Pick a lane because right now you are just completely embarrassing yourself by arguing both sides of a basic financial contradiction.