No, the game is decent or mediocre. The mods make it good. Sort of like how a car can suck, but then modified to be all right.

Running old games on a new pc might be a headache, but I'll take that headache over not being able to play games at all, like for example how my PS2 games don't work very well on PS4.

People are free to keep their old PCs around to play older games on if they want. No one's forcing anyone to install the newest windows, or forcing them to throw away the old hardware. Many do though, because they'll deal with a bit of a headache to save some physical space. And also because the headache involved in most games is very very minor.

Which games did you have in mind?