Why? I guess easier vertical integration and familiarity.
Oxide builds their own hardware and firmware, some of the founders and employees worked for Sun for a long time and developed important Solaris contributions (e.g. Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, two of the developers of DTrace).
The primary reasons that these companies used these Unix varieties was that they already had heavy iron that used these things, and they work well so there is no advantage to throwing that investment away to move to something else. The other large, and definitely related, reason is that they had existing internal software written for these platforms that is more cost-effective to continue to use than to replace.
They had many of their business-critical custom enterprise apps running on HP-UX on many HP PA-RISC servers worldwide, at various locations.