At the very least most games were less buggy on release than Gta5 is now in 2026. There were negative examples of course, but that’s the minority.

but an official method would possibly be better.

This may not be true at all. Like some of these old emulators are essentially perfect, have not tried the xbox360 one, but ps2 emulation is perfect, for many titles it’s better than playing on the console once you are past the setup.

Like imagine if the official emulator required you to attach a dvd-drive to your computer & even then how would the copy protection detection even work? Will they just give up on this now?

It’s a logical conclusion of the present situation. No one will pay for grass or asphalt textures, when genai can produce more variety than any human asset artist ever could. In coding it’s a more complicated situation, but for certain tasks it’s almost dumb not to use ai. Even of you don’t use it to actually write code it’s still helpful to a varying degree.