If you're a Mac user, you expect this sort of thing. If running neglected software is critical to you, you run Windows or you keep your old Macs around.
A lot of software is for x64 only.
If Rosetta2 goes away, Parallels support for x64 binaries in VMs likely goes away too. Parallels is not neglected software. The x64 software you'd want to run on Parallels are not neglected software.
This is a short-sighted move. It's also completely unprecedented; Apple has dropped support for previous architectures and runtimes before, but never when the architecture or runtime was the de facto standard.
https://docs.parallels.com/parallels-desktop-developers-guid...
Rosetta 2 never supported emulating a full VM, only individual applications.
FWIW, Windows running on a 64-bit host no longer runs 16-bit binaries.
Which isn't an issue since Windows 95 was not a 16-bit OS, that was MS-DOS. For 16-bit DOS apps there's virtualization things like DOSbox or even HW emulators.
