I couldn't agree more, with the addition of dosbox and PCem/86box.
There's a ton of titles from the late 90s onwards to ~2010 that don't work correctly on modern Windows - either very unreliable, have something fundamental broken, or don't start at all.
This especially applies to games from the from the pre-Vista era - things like DirectSound & DirectDraw being rewritten in Vista broke a lot. In addition, newer GPUs & drivers have broken older games - even big names like The Sims 2 have graphical artifacting - unless you use DXVK! I understand that sometimes this is due to the game doing something incorrect that happened to work okay at the time, but that's still unhelpful if I want to get something to run.
Running games from my childhood requires a mix of dosbox (for most classic DOS titles), PCem/86box (for really weird old titles that don't run on anything that isn't win95/98, or DOS titles that relied on 3dfx hardware).
Get a bit newer and it's dgVoodoo2 (for games that use old DirectX or Glide), DXVK (even on windows!), or I just give up and run them on Linux with Wine - which usually just works. The odd title still needs some patching (like eg Max Payne, but that's because of a CPU incompatibility with AMD Zen CPUs) - but it's nearly always less hassle than trying to run older titles on Windows 10 or 11.