There are amazing retro games that are still awesome to play to this day. To say they all suck, and it's just nostalgia is not true at all.
Sure, a lot of them suck, especially on Nintendo 64, because of the 3d transition, but from the NES onward there are timeless classics.
My kid beat super Metroid several times, he decided to play it on his own on his switch, and he loved it. He plays the old pokemon games too. In other words, that's a terrible analogy.
You're choosing the top 10 games on the Nintendo 64 and NES to make your analogy; out of the thousands and thousands of games produced for those systems. Give your kid game #50 (Waialae Country Club: True Golf Classics on N64) and see if she would prefer it over literally any modern game that ranks on Steam. My analogy holds.
Why would you compare "any modern game that ranks on Steam" with random games from the era?
You said
> It's the same phenomenon where people think their Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 was a masterpiece never paralleled, revisit it in 2025, and realize: "wow... this... sucks actually."
I actually tried re-playing PS games I remember enjoying, and I still enjoy them.
I see what you mean about the fact that people look at old stuff with rose-tinted glasses, but really some things did age well (including parts of the early web).