I must admit I immediately questioned the credibility of the article when the author admitted they "aren't a gamer" and then started making allusions to vague political threads. Not to say these criticisms aren't valid, but they're a weird jumping off point
The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. Every step in this process locks out some subset of customers. And that's not including the ones who meet the technical requirements but are turned off enough by the decision to just avoid the games anyway
They're an unfortunate response to how utterly profitable and expansive cheating in online games has become. They cost the companies precious development time that could be spent making the game better to instead make it just vaguely "playable" for normal people
EA showed they had Red Alert 2 tapes in the archive when they did the C&C Remaster stuff back in 2018-2020
The Mental Omega folks are also known to have a complete archive of everything which is why their "mod" is such a technical achievement above what the game engine can normally do
History is important and interesting to some of us. Just because it's not a direct 1:1 mapping of computer problems today doesn't make it any less intellectually stimulating to read about
You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)
There's faster single thread accelerator cards that were made for a while by a guy on the 68kMLA forums, but that was many years ago. I think Action Retro on YouTube has one that broke 2Ghz
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