And some games want an older version of Proton (like River City Girls), so it's not always intuitive what the fix might be, but there's several options to improve compatibility, these days.

Now that ntsync has been added to the upstream kernel for the next release, it will only get better.

better part of last couple of decades

You mean like the lock down period

Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don't work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead

Kinda weird rather, because Proton is basically wine + a lot of profiled tweaks for the titles. With wine you usually have to manually figure out tweaks or use third party installers, like through Lutris, which often also are somewhat wacky.