Older consoles had even more dedicated chips doing relevant stuff other than "simple" I/O, like e.g. the SNES's sound chip, which was a completely independent CPU running its own little programs in parallel with the CPU and GPU.
Of course you could "mandate" a high-level VM for all future game development, but given the static nature of console hardware specs, that wouldn't be competitive for titles wanting to make use of cutting-edge graphics.
On Debian, I found I had to run
dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update
What saddens me is that open-source OSes do not want to provide a common set of APIs so that the developer only has to write and test the code once and it works everywhere. There is flatpak, but as I understand, it doesn't provide a set of APIs, it simply packs a Linux distribution into a virtual machine without any specifications or documentation. So ugly, and no compatibility for smaller non-Linux OSes.
It's funny how the Mac is more compatible with old Windows programs than old Mac programs.
AFAIK, no 64-bit version of Windows ever shipped with native 16-bit support, though. That means 16-bit support on x86-64 in practice was only ever usable on a 32-bit operating system, which means you still couldn't have 64-bit, 32-bit, and 16-bit code running side-by-side, even if the hardware could theoretically support it.
Intel does want to get rid of most of the compatibility modes, including all 16-bit support, but they haven't done it yet: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
It’s a shame that I can’t play with my son from my Linux PC since he plays on switch (so the c#/bedrock edition)
There is an unofficial Linux launcher that can run the Android build
There are some plugins for the java edition server that allow bedrock clients to join, that might be an option for you.
Although there is an unofficial Linux launcher capable of running Bedrock natively using the embedded machine code in the Android version but it requires to buy the game one more time from the Google play store.
It models statically-typed compiled languages in a much superior way to WASM, there are projects showcasing how well e.g. Rust maps to it[0], and C++/CLI existed for a long time (although it's not cross-platform, and is considered cursed).
C and C++ could be mapped in a perfect manner to IL and then AOT compiled in ways that GraalVM's Truffle can only dream of (given that .NET exposes a very wide set of intrinsics allowing a lot of code to be ported that way).
Wine (+ Steam's Proton) works incredibly well these days, a huge improvement from the old days when barely anything ran, and what did run required heavy tweaking or even custom compilation.
On Linux, my Steam library of about 300 games runs almost in its entirety without issues (except for Last Epoch).