> To what end? The biggest benefit of tinkering with 40-year-old hardware is the experience of doing so.

The biggest benefit to you. Other people, most people in fact, just like the game and want to enjoy it in new ways. They don't care about the code or reverse engineering itself. That people now benefit that it's easy to decompile because otherwise outside of really big titles like sm64, probably nobody is going to take the effort to manually decompile a less popular game.

That's the egoistical part.

Nobody is forcing you to use AI. And it's not really any different to how people would build their own NES emulators to learn instead of just grabbing whatever best NES emulator already exist.