> Why am I not allowed to revive an old mobile phone with a new OS version? Why am I not allowed to revive an old device by modernizing its hardware driver? Why can I not bring an old video game back to life?

Hardware is complicated and there are just not enough people with the deep understanding to fix it. I've got lots of old 'open source' devices that lost traction in their developer community. Nobody ever managed to recreate a usable OS for the old Sharp Zaurus PDA until the device itself was completely obsolete.

New OS versions rely on new hardware functions (or just a higher amount of memory or I/O to be usable) so patching to run on old hardware won't deliver something running well.

Video games are a bit of a special case because there's the media copyright as well. But there are lots of reimplementations of game engines so maybe you can't but others certainly do...