Quotecould operate (and DID!!) with as little as 2MB of memory, 8MB ought to be plenty!
That's right.... every consecutive Windows release up the use of RAM and hard disk space by quite a noticeable margin. Often for no good reason. But RAM is pretty inexpensive these days and so are SSDs, let alone HDDs, thankfully.
QuoteI wonder how much power it draws
The answer is "not a lot", I imagine. I have no idea how exactly that custom CPU works - does it process the instructions natively, does it do emulation - but it's certainly built with some relatively modern process such as 14 nm so at 40 MHz, it will be very cold and very frugal.
QuoteMy 1366x768 machines are obviously still a lot more useful in the modern world than those 386 systems.
If they're running XP, they definitely are. We have half a dozen unofficial Chrome builds for XP now that make it possible to do regular Web browsing without major issues. I don't know if any antivirus/firewall maker still supports XP, though. I know for certain that Win7 and Win8.1 are still kind of supported. It was just the other day that I tried installing the free AVG antivirus on my Win7-running Aspire V5 laptop. It says its virus definitions are up to date but the core version has last been updated in H2 2022.