Very interesting. The "why" context seems to be buried in an issue comment https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/issues/181#issuec... and I guess the purpose is to emulate old iOS games, from the early Cambrian explosion of ideas at the start of the App Store. This is also an era I am nostalgic for, with lots of new concepts, art pieces, and indie games, before anyone knew how to sustainably monetize, for better or worse. For example, Distant Shore is definitely a relic from a simpler time! https://johnnybgamer.com/2009/08/13/distant-shore/
No need to hunt so deep into the repo, it's right there in the 3rd paragraph of the description: "The goal of this project is to run games from the early days of iOS"
Everyone except game developers managed to come over just fine. This is a skill issue on the game devs' part that they can't stop themselves from doing bad pointer arithmetic.
Note you can run 32-bit Windows games through WINE/Rosetta.
Distant shore was fantastic, I remember playing it a ton when I was younger and got an iPod touch for the first time. I've been thinking about that concept of game and how it could be integrated into other games