Deleted Domain worthwhile anymore?

Generally speaking, if the domain has no penalty, no spam and good authority links, but it has sat unused for a while, is there any benefit to building the site out?

As an example: If I start a Car blog and I find a site with backlinks from Scholarly Mechanical and Automotive engineering sites, but the site has not been used in a few years. Would you go ahead an buy it ? I mean, where else would your random car affiliate site be able to get a dofllow link from a site like: https://libguides.csun.edu/me/

thoughts?

just test it. Buy it, put it on a free hosting, throw 100 posts of unique content that's at least 1000 words each on it, submit the sitemap to GSC and give it 1 month. If it starts ranking and bringing in traffic and sales then it's worth it

One single link from edu is not enough, if that domain got multiple good links, go for it.

I think in this situation the best decision would be to sell that domain name out. Just work on some ideas and sell it.