technology

I don't have it anymore, but there's a really interesting interview with an archivist of a major museum going into lot of good reasons why we can't rely on piracy to preserve video-games. Among the reasons for this were:

• Software piracy often receives crackdowns, making large collections suddenly disappear
• Piracy mostly functions out of a question of interest. More niche products will not be saved on seedboxes and so on. To confirm this for yourself, try to find academic literature in a language that isn't english on pdf-piracy sites. I've struggled trying to find specfic german, danish and french manuals that never got reprinted into english or broader circulation.
• Some games are near impossible to emulate and so you need the hardware in order to run them.
• Even if their archives are not destroyed, a power outage or wifi-outage makes it unavailable.

As for stuff before 1985 that never got uploaded to the internet somewhere, preserving that would've been shockingly difficult I would imagine and definitely very easy to lose forever regardless of what form it exists in

That is exactly the point people are making. In 1985 people in arcades were going "eh the historians will manage."
Look at the many stories of all copies of films being destroyed. Famously a lot of doctor who is just gone because BBC taped over their shows.

Here is a video essay on the subject, that also references the studies