A lot of the wall lights (non iconic) were trashed each year.
To add to this as a person who does a christmas light show every year:
Most of the lights used at Osbourne, whether led or not, were old-school "dumb" lights. Meaning they turned on/off and maybe changed colors or had pre-programmed chase/fade/etc sequences like you see on the strands you buy at a bigbox store. I could be wrong but I think the large canopy they did was smart lights, where we can program individual lights to be any shade of the rainbow and make patterns out of them.
Installs of dense dumb lights like that, you use large matrices or meshes and then connect them directly to controllers which make blinky flashy things happen. A patchwork of meshes are thrown up and hot glued down. (yes, hot glue is the secret used by the pros). Once attached to the building, power and data are spliced (soldered and shrinkwrapped for waterproofing) into the wires connecting the various meshes together. Its almost like sewing together a quilt, and it becomes a mess of wires.
Throughout the season, lots of lights stop working. Water, heat, bulbs, power surges, fuses blow, etc. Where possible you replace bulbs and fuses, but often you just don't have time. If the crowds show up at dusk and you've got half the show running you look like an idiot. So you cut out the areas that are problematic and splice in replacements. By the end of the season you have wires that look like Frankenstein was experimenting with. Tape, glue, solder, jumper wires, random fuses, buck converters, etc. all sticking off of it. You could try and save the wires, but honestly they'll rust over the year, and the cheap lights really don't hold up that well anyways.
During take down, a good pair of nippers and a heatgun become your friend. Snip the wires, use the heat gun to melt the glue and its gone.
Cut to today, and most of us are using smart LEDs that look like bullets or squares wired together. (Christmas nerds call them 'pixels') Pixels are more costly, usually 12-24 cents per light compared to about a cent or two per dumb bulb. But they last surprisingly long, they get coated in silicone to keep moisture out, and there is much less nightly maintenance that needs to go on and they don't really as many problems. (Except LED strip lights, those things will fail on 5 out of 6 dice rolls) An installer will definitely spend more time and money taking pixels down and can use them for many years.
