That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.
Some fans even made patches for bugs in Master of Orion, in the binary.
Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack also received community patches (I contributed to them a lot) to its binary. When EA later released The First Decade bundle with all the old games in it, they removed the old copy-protection. Most games in the bundle were simply recompiled to remove it, but for the expansion pack they hex-edited the copy-protection to keep it community patch compatible.