I had four unused HDMI cables. One day, I needed to send a signal from my PC to my tv. I usually use Plex for convenience and the "resume where I left off" feature, but that day a certain update was acting up, so I decided to use a cable instead. Easy. The next day, I wanted to send a signal from my laptop to the tv downstairs (I still hadn't fixed the Plex issue) and pulled out the second cable because I needed a different length than the first one... but it turned out to be incompatible, so I ended up using the third one.

I also did the "only keep one of each" purge, but that last part about throwing away a tool because you can just buy another one later is nuts to me. Yeah you could do that. You could also throw away all your cables and just buy them when you need another lol.

HDMI and Ethernet are comedies at this point, no need to hoard so many. The point is to not throw away the more rare/niche ones since getting one after will be hard and/or expensive.

> What do I need 8 HDMI cables for

5 for five generations of consoles into the same TV

1 for the audio bar

1 for the hdmi switch to the tv

1 for a laptop when nothing else works