It's likely just meaning new compilations coming down the line as there is zero cost and zero maintenance for them to keep the games up otherwise and is entirely passive income.
It was also created long long before developers had these predatory business models, where it basically shielded the industry from having goverment oversight on violence in games back in the 90s and such.
I wouldn't say self-regulation has "literally never worked once in history", but yes, not often. I would point to the ESRB as an example of self-regulation working in the games industry and being a positive for both the industry itself avoiding government regulation and for players. There are other examples too, but yes, they would be rare wins in general.
20 year industry vet here. When I started, it was in a company that was hiring nothing but people that have never worked in games before (and they did not tell us this, like some bad reality show). Of the ~200+ people I worked with there when I started, I would very generously estimate maybe only 10-15 of us still in the industry. To be fair, conditions in the industry have gotten a lot better since most of those people left it. The days of doing 80+ hours a week are long gone for most of us as far as I can tell.
It's really all about loving who you are working with. Even if you hate the project or the hours, just enjoying being around the right people makes a huge difference. Writing that is making me realize just how many of my favorite people and closest friends are now elsewhere and damn, I miss them.
There's very little reason to buy this when Best Buy is selling the ROG Ally X for $200 cheaper with bigger battery, better performance, better screen, better support, etc... But will say I'm glad to see Ayaneo making it into Best Buy at all. Just... needed to be a year earlier.
The more simplistic models being used with the FMV backgrounds was done to keep the framerate of the characters high while the PSX was busy with MPEG decoding.
Everything I'm running gets between 100-120+ fps with AFMF2 with far less artifacting than previous AFMF1. I'm mentioning VRR because it means that if a game doesn't hit 120FPS, it stays perfectly smooth so frame dips are far less noticeable. I'm using an ROG Ally X, so I don't spend much time worrying about battery power at all anymore unlike the previous ROG Ally. I get about 2-3 hours playing the bigger games on it and for anything that I want to basically play forever (2d stuff), I can set screen to 720p, lock screen to 60fps (or less) and lock TDP to 7 watts and get 10 or so hours out of it.
If you aren't interested in trying the driver with AFMF2 (which is not yet officially released for the handheld Windows devices yet but can be sideloaded), you can also play with Lossless Scaling on Steam which can also do frame generation up to 4x.
Again, AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2. And when there are cases where your game cannot hit whatever threshold needed for 120fps, that's where the variable refresh rate comes in.
Having the option for 120hz on the ROG Ally was a game changer. Especially combined with AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 which just released and variable refresh rate on the screen. It's hard to go back to anything without them now.