I remember when Eccleston's version came out and all the nerd blogs were crying cause this means these episodes were never gonna be released.

You are so right.They are never gonna be released.

The cost to make a digital copy from film stock has gone way down, to the point that fan groups [1][2] frequently encode and clean up old copies of film:

[1]: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/kinekovideo

This of course has various IP implications...