Yep, clearly the only way to go is through non-official means.
In another decade or two though, good luck buying a single piece of computer kit that won't have "trusted computing modules" built in that lock down the entire system and guarantee nothing unapproved by whatever powers that be can run.
The only hope is a political movement pushing to secure more consumer rights. But there is depressingly absolutely no movement for that happening right now.
The way Microsoft and Apple are going, wouldn't surprise me if in who knows how many years, we're either running old OS's on our rigs and/or running Linux, for our gaming needs.
When it comes to game preservation, the industry's awful at this. You'd think companies would purposely re-issue, re-master, re-release and keep their old games alive more than they already do. How many of these games, if re-released properly, would just be basically be a license to just print $ for them?
Yet, a lot of times - eh, they don't do this stuff; and we have to resort to mods to fix their broken and/or un-updated products.
You'd think, these companies would make sure they keep their source code and stuff like that around, so they can keep re-releasing & re-mastering stuff, to keep that cash flow going and to keep people interested in sequels to their franchises.
DRM, anti-tamper, restrictive game-clients, features built-into only specific services, no LAN support, no local multiplayer, and/or stuff like that is only shackling these things down.
And services like Game Pass w/ their file restrictions - that ain't helping anyone here either. I'd probably gladly buy more games from Microsoft and their Game Store, if someone found ways around these folders with an app or something, Microsoft gave us access to these files, and/or something of that sort. As broken as G4WL was as a service, even G4WL was better at that stuff at not restricting game-folder access - since in that regard, it was still old-school w/ file access. At least I can run some old G4WL games like The Club, thanks to file access and modders making the game work w/out it.