When I was at OTAG in Sacramento, the 2nd Street Armory had barrels of M1903s and M1911s sitting in cosmoline, along with ammunition and various other things. They were originally given to teh state by the US Army during WWII when every state's National Guard had been mobilized and incorporated into the Regular Army. They were intended to arm the various state militias and defense forces that formed to replace the missing Guard units.
In about 1998 they decided to dispose of most of it, with the vast majority being demilled and recycled. That decision would not have been made in most of the T2K timelines, and I'd expect that in the post war era many rear echelon formations to be armed with M1903s.
Also, Sierra Army Depot has been mentioned. In the mid-1990s many strange things could be found in dark corners of many Army equipment depots and warehouses.
The Soviets never threw anything away, and had several WWII-era division sets of equipment stored, maintained and ready to go... tanks, artillery, small arms, ammo, trucks, uniforms, everything... as well as later divisional sets... 1950s, 1960s, etc.
Keep in mind the Soviet reserve systems wasn't like ours. They didn't do the "one weekend a month/ two weeks per year" like we do. Most Soviet youth were conscripted, spent 2 years training, then went home and never saw the military again. Their NCOs were largely conscripts from the same year group who showed leadership potential or other factors... bt they were really no more experienced than their peers... much like our "noncommissioned officer candidate school" of the Vietnam era.
The Soviet reserve plan was that conscripts from a particular period were kept together and on mobilization they would fall in on a divisional set of equipment appropriate for when they were conscripted. As they and their equipment got older, they were bumped down the readiness lists until they were completely too old for service... I think when the youngest conscripts in the group reached 60 or something they were completely removed from mobilization charts... but until then they were kept organized on paper as a "division" based on geographical loction and assigned a particular divisional set of equipment, which most never saw.
However when the division was finally "retired" the equipment was retained. The plan at that point was, in the evet of extended war, new units would be conscripted train and fall in on the old equipment. So, in theory, new 16 year old conscripts could have been trained and deployed with T34s and other WWII era equipment.
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It's not that they may be easier to maintain, technology-wise. It's that they require so much more of it the older they get. It's easy to troubleshoot and replace an LRU on new kit. When you have to half-step down to the circuit card or the mechanical subassembly and then physically repair it, it is infinitely more difficult and time-consuming, even if the equipment is easier to understand and repairs can be done with a screwdriver and wrench but takes 4 hrs instead of 15 minutes - when you have a fleet of vehicles you are maintaining.
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True to an extent, but also not.
It is possible to machine, forge or cast anything a T34 need to function in combat in post-war T2K. Nobody is making black boxes for M1A1s or T80s in T2K's 2001.
Repairing modern equipment is easier IF you have the parts, but impossible without them. In the modern US Army, going back to at least 1990, nobody at the line level "fixes" M1 engines. If there is a problem, except for a few specific replacement parts, you replace the engine entirely and ship the broken one to a depot for fixing. Tank battalion mait platoons carry those few parts that can be replaced, and entire engines. That's it. When there are no more engines, there is almost nothing that a battalion, brigade or even divisional maint shop can do to fix the M1's engine... and nobody is forging turbine blades anywhere but the factory.
ICE engines are different, but fire control computers and such are not. You replace black boxes, or it stays broken. Even engines with computer controls are iffy to fix in a shade tree environment.
T34s, M46 and M47... even M48 and M48A1 can mostly be fixed with a basic machine shop and a hot enough fire. By 2002ish the old WWII equipment would likely rule the battlefield of T2K, and M1s and T80s would be reduced to immobile gun emplacements operating in emergency manual mode.