The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions.
> We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced.
Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't.
We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.
Accuracy is paramount. Targeting else than the console's sound is an affront to preservation.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...
Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.
I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?