I've wondered myself why there's so little overlap between these two closely related interests of mine. Some of it seems to be the "But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs." effect, where some of the people working on exploiting games ONLY care about what can be done in their one game of interest - it doesn't always generalize to interest in using the same techniques against everything else.

Of course there's also the fact that exploiting 20-30 year old games is just vastly easier than modern software, due to the total lack of mitigations in them. And that's on top of the fact that with popular games, you're building on decades of reverse engineering work rather than (potentially) starting from scratch. And the arguably superior toolset (savestates etc).

But I think a very big factor is the one this blogpost is trying to address - most people just don't know anything at all about the vuln research industry, which is not exactly searching for attention in the ways that speedruns broadcast to hundreds of thousands of viewers for charity are.