I think you might be a bit behind on the mobile game market. Stuff like the Resident Evil Village and the Resident Evil 4 remake are on Apple arcade and actually playable. Furthermore, you can stream both PS+ games and Gamepass games on phones now. There's an emerging market of having single player games from last gen consoles ported to mobile and PC at the same time, as well. Lemmy might tell you that the Steam deck is the mobile gaming device of the future, but that's very much because Lemmy is a techy, older, Western niche audience with disposable income. Buying a phone is much easier to justify than buying a "gaming machine".

I agree with you about the monetization of gatcha games, but that's not going away, especially when people playing stuff like Genshin Impact or Honkai think it's "worth it" because they are higher fidelity games that they can play without having to put the up front costs of a console/PC.

I can't comment much about emulation, I just got into it. But I installed Dolphin onto my old Pixel just as their servers got borked from the achievements update, so I have to go back and actually play around with it.