> I used to use Wine a lot for applications in the early 2010s and it was always hit and miss
IME Wine is still hit and miss for applications in general, even old ones. Games are just a particularly good fit here—they rarely care how well your COM marshalling or shell namespace or transactional NTFS or weird SQL-like inside Windows Installer is implemented. Not to imply that getting games to work is a simple task, just that the API surface is much less spread out, and any emulation improvements for a single game are more likely to improve support for a wider range of other games.
IME Wine is still hit and miss for applications in general, even old ones. Games are just a particularly good fit here—they rarely care how well your COM marshalling or shell namespace or transactional NTFS or weird SQL-like inside Windows Installer is implemented. Not to imply that getting games to work is a simple task, just that the API surface is much less spread out, and any emulation improvements for a single game are more likely to improve support for a wider range of other games.