Reminds me of libhoudini (ARM -> x86 translation layer) from the days when x86 Android phones were still thing. Performance wasn't amazing but compatibility was surprisingly good.
One sneaky thing Intel did was their Atoms targeting tablets of the same era used the same PowerVR chipset as the iOS devices of the time, which were what everyone had optimised for. The consequence was many games could run on such things surprisingly well since the GPU tended to be the limiting factor anyway.
Not just phones, I recently set up waydroid on an old netbook so my son could play the Khan Academy Kids app. Since the Android container is x86-64 and KAK is ARM-only the libhoudini translation layer was required and worked perfectly.