Keep in mind this is the second time they have switched arches and the second round of complaints of Rosetta removal.
I didn't want the PPC emulator removed and I don't want the x86 emulator to be removed either. If that makes me a weirdo, so be it.
Even a good emulator might fix bugs that some piece of software relied on.
It’s certainly a shame if they got rid of Rosetta forever so hopefully it’s still available as an optional download.
Now that they have stopped supporting Intel-based Macs, I understand the desire to not have to port new code and features to x86-64 to keep legacy apps happy.
That is why Intel-based Mac App support is going away, but Rosetta 2 as infrastructure will remain - a much smaller footprint of system functionality will be addressable by x86-64 code that they can reasonably maintain going forward.
That's actually better than where I thought we would be now - I thought by M6 they would remove the hardware extensions that allow Rosetta 2 function from Apple Silicon.