For most people, the main barrier to playing old games on modern PCs is the new operating system itself. Since the system design changed a lot over the last couple decades, the older the game, the lower the chance of it working on a modern OS. There's obviously emulation (when you run a copy of let's say windows XP in a window on your windows 11, and then a game on that windows XP), but even for most regular gamers that's already a hurdle to set up properly, so for a layman who just wants to play a favourite game from his childhood memories on a Sunday evening, I'd imagine it's a night impossible task. On a brighter note, people who do know how to code also suffer from nostalgia, and they can actually do something about it, hence many classics have recently seen open source remakes, like OpenTTD, OpenRCT2 (RollerCoaster Tycoon), and Julius (remake of Caesar 3) just to name a few, so there's still hope in that I guess.