Luckily the PS2's still hanging on at the edge of "pretty easy to play with real games and real hardware", outside a handful of very expensive games. And the discs aren't old enough that tons of them have been lost to damage and rot yet, though I've seen several of mine rot to death in the last 5 years or so, even always being stored indoors, so that's changing fast. By 2025 I expect this to have joined most of the consoles before it in being easier to get an OK experience through emulation than to play on real hardware.

Timing remains my main problem with emulation. Input and output lag have gotten really bad and so hard to predict until you start actually messing with the equipment you'll be using, and even then little config quirks or the way things are hooked up (adding a receiver to the mix, for instance) can throw it all over the place. Lots of games become unplayable or unreasonably hard with just a little extra lag, so it's a real problem.