Is it practical for Apple to produce a set of frameworks for Intel that run some useful set of old games but that do not run any useful set of non game software?

I grant it’s probably possible to do, but I think that is a lot more work and more error prone than just continuing to ship the major frameworks as they were.

From Apple’s perspective I’m sure they have a few big goals here:

1. Encourage anyone who wants to continue offering software on Mac to update their builds to include arm64.

2. Reduce download size, on disk size, and memory use of macOS.

3. Reduce QA burden of testing ancient 3rd party software.

These are also the same motivations Apple had when they eliminated 32 bit Intel and when they eliminated Rosetta 1, but they were criticized especially for leaving behind game libraries.

Arguably, arbitrarily restricting what runs gets them the biggest slice of their goals with the minimum work. Devs are given the stick. People typically only play 1 game at a time and then quit it, so there isn’t a bunch of Intel code in RAM all the time because of a few small apps hanging out, and they have less to test because it’s a finite set of games. It just will chafe because if they do that then you know that some unblessed software could run but Apple is just preventing it to make their lives easier.