It's a solution with a lot of its own problems, but old hardware can help mitigate a lot of this. I can easily run software written for any Apple platform back

It's a solution with a lot of its own problems, but old hardware can help mitigate a lot of this. I can easily run software written for any Apple platform back to the original Apple II (along with several other non-Apple platforms) on original hardware. I'm not suggesting everybody with an interest in old data hoard old machines like me, but perhaps organizations like the Computer History Museum could make available machines for accessing, converting, and saving old software and data to those who need it (possibly for a fee). And for the specific items in this post, it's not as if anything is an emergency right now. It's reasonable to expect that working Intel Macs will be around for decades to come, just like you can find operational 68K and PowerPC Macs without much trouble right now. It's actually gotten easier to get data on/off a lot of old machines with time, due to things like floppy emulators, SCSI2SD adapters, serial to WiFi adapters, etc. The author could buy a G4 capable of running OS 9 and OS X for less than $100 if they wanted to, and it would still easily connect to modern networks, access modern USB drives, etc. All hardware will die eventually, but that's going to happen regardless of any processor transition, and there's just no way that these same problems are going to be entirely prevented by sticking with x86 forever. I do hope somebody comes up with a (non-Apple/Rosetta) x86 emulator for Apple Silicon Macs, sort of like VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs.