“All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.”
This is what real engineering looks like. Five years chasing a floating-point rounding bug in a single instruction so that Mario Strikers Charged can sync between Dolphin and actual Wii hardware. For 15 players. They also cracked Triforce arcade emulation after 18 years and finally got Rogue Squadron III running at full speed. Open source projects like this make the entire commercial games industry look lazy.