Digital games can be pirated. DRM that runs on the client can be fooled or bypassed with enough effort. Storage is becoming cheaper as time goes by. Time is generally not critical for any of these.
Unlike all of these things, reliance on servers has no real solution and is a guaranteed ticking timebomb. Many games released today (manly "live service" games) have no offline mode and simply cannot fully function offline even if they're reverse-engineered and modified to do so, because a significant part of the game logic code and data is simply not present on the client. Often the only real hope is attempting to reverse-engineer the server logic and capture relevant data via packet sniffing so custom server software can be developed that emulates the behavior of the official servers accurately enough to allow the game to be played, but games nowadays are becoming so complex and game logic is becoming so intertwined with the servers that this is simply not a feasible task unless you have direct access to the server data somehow.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that has largely not manifested yet, so most people don't yet realize it's a problem. Live service games only started becoming the norm in the last decade, and the vast majority of the popular ones are still in operation. In a decade or two, most live service games people love today will no longer be playable due to the servers being shut down, and developers have no financial incentive to allow them to be playable after that. Will a solution be found before then? Probably not. I'm not looking forward to it.
No, the actual way forward for large scale preservation requires donning a pirate's hat. The people really doing legitimate preservation work are largely doing it outside of the purview of the copyright holders (and often in direct opposition to the rightsholders' desires). This has always been the case and will continue to be the case as long as copyright remains in force in the current form.
Preserving the games themselves, including server components or emulators, is key to this. As it stands, it already requires there be someone with the personal interest in a specific game, and the technical ability to crack it. Without that, such a game won't be preserved no matter what. Requiring publishers to make such things available at some point can only help. It removes or mitigates that later requirement.
This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.
Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].
[0] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=9035 [1] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=83169
However, it is much more pleasurable and less of a grind when fighting monsters made up of a million 3D triangles as opposed to one made up of 100 2D squares.
(I wanted to make a snarky irrelevant note but now I want to remember what it was.)
https://kotaku.com/when-south-park-got-an-ea-sports-game-pul...
https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/13/crash-bandicoot...
I de-googled to avoid being at the mercy of a for-profit company for more important identity-related matters, but it'd be a sad day if I ever lost access to the archive of games.
The only real threat is fragmentation of game stores so that you cannot get all games on a single store.
Now mostly this is leveraged to finish up the online features (ie. pvp), as one obviously can't play online without connecting to the net, and then that's an opportunity to download a patch. However, these patches do have other fixes and surely there are some companies that are leveraging this significantly more than others for general fixes that have nothing to do with online features.