I am sorry, I did not mean to imply anyone else is doing something poorly. I believe glibc's (and the rest of the ecosystem of libraries that are probably more limiting) policies and principled stance are quite correct and overall "good for humanity". But as you mentioned, they are inconvenient for a gamer that just wants to run an executable from 10 years ago (for which the source was lost when the game studio was bought).

that 10 year old binary should run, unless it links against a library that no longer exists.

for example here is a 20 year old binary of the game mirrormagic that runs just fine on my modern fedora machine:

    ~/Downloads/mirrormagic-2.0.2> ldd mirrormagic
        linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f38000)
        libX11.so.6 => /lib/libX11.so.6 (0xf7db5000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xf7cd0000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xf7ad5000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xf7aa9000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f3b000)
        libXau.so.6 => /lib/libXau.so.6 (0xf7aa4000)
    ~/Downloads/mirrormagic-2.0.2> ls -la mirrormagic
    -rwxr-xr-x. 1 em-bee em-bee 203633 Jun  7  2003 mirrormagic