I’ve also had problems (pictured) with DVD CDs, and haven’t touched my DVD collection for a long time, but after 24 years of DVDs, there’s bound to be something more missing.

CD/DVDs can be damaged, but they contain some degree of error correction codes so that every scratch or misreading doesn’t immediately result in a bad image.
So far I’ve only had one failure with a CD (UK manufacturer didn’t get the formula right which caused the rust). Almost all of my old ones work fine.

It’s nice that my 40 year old (complete) NES kit worked perfectly after all these years (with a fair amount of maintenance), but there was one major leak in the wrong place, and I was screwed.

Maintaining, of course, isn’t just about maintaining your own collection, it’s also about ensuring there are enough redundant copies of titles in circulation. What is delivered digitally is only stored for broadcast in a very limited number of places.

These memory chips simply degrade, and there are a lot of older Atari 2600 cartridges that no longer work (properly).

Not too bad, especially since a process was used when manufacturing the ROM chips where the fuses are “burned out”, which is quite permanent. Hence there is no slowly disappearing charge as with PROM and later erasable flash memory.
Almost all of my 2600 games still work.

In addition, you also have to worry about affordability and ease of use. Just try connecting an unmodified Atari 2600 to a modern LCD monitor without special hardware.

Even modern TVs often have analog RF antenna inputs. So, in principle, the Atari is just as useful as it was before.

This playable Atari 2600 “Air Raid” cartridge is now selling for over $10,000…

This is of course an anomaly and not an argument that it is a problem from a cost perspective. Average sales prices for Atari 2600 games are around €2 each.