I am curious as to why you think wine is obsolete?

Proton uses wine heavily, so there is a massive market with the steam deck using wine to run their games.

Proton is Wine, isn't it? It's a friendly downstream fork.

Afaik Proton is just Wine + Prebuilt configs and tweaks.

For me, I have a few pieces of older hardware with proprietary Windows applications and no Linux equivalent. A 10 year old Cricut and a 15 year old scanner.

Also, some 16 bit Windows applications that probably won't even run on current Windows, like the Windows Entertainment Pack that shipped with Windows 3.1. You can pry that version of Tetris from my cold, dead hands.

Of course, I also use the version of Wine that's built into Steam for nearly every game I play.

Pretty much has only gotten more relevant over time. Since the advent of Proton there are even less native Linux games being released.

Yeah, for example, The Talos Principle, which was championed as a great example of a game that works natively on Linux, decided to go with a Windows-only release with Proton support on Linux for the sequel, The Talos Principle 2. To be fair, though, the game does run flawlessly via Proton.