>"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.