Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUT UUUUUP!!! :matt-jokerfied:
Just get a fucking rom!!! Go to Google and you can have the game on your hard drive in 5 minutes! Chances are your "incredibly rare" cult classic is playable with a high degree of accuracy. Even if you dislike emulation, you can just burn a disc, put the game on internal storage or use an Evercart depending on the system.
We don't have to pretend we need to hunt down decades-old pieces plastic to access old video games. What's that? Kuon for PS2 is really rare and expensive? Well I'm going to go download it right now to spite your collector brainworms... AND IT WILL BE 100% FREE OF CHARGE
For a lot of these g*me reviewer types getting a physical copy of a game is part collector brain and status symbol. If you want to enjoy the game for the sake of enjoying the game there is basically no reason not to download the ROM save in those rare cases where that specific game doesn't emulate well or there is no emulator at all. And these days those limitations are rapidly shrinking
even if the emulator doesn't work for a particular game, most of the time you can just bypass the copy protection and load the rom onto a fake cart/cd/whatever, no forking money over to a bazinga brain needed