I will copy a comment a week ago in another thread:

It was five years after her first Android phone that I noticed that when asked to install an app, my aunt proceeded to download an APK from a random website and installed that rather than using the Play Store. In fact, I think she didn’t even know the Play Store was a thing, and she was on her third android phone already.

She isn’t tech-savvy, she did that because that is how she did on Windows. After that, I just accepted that things need to change in a way that might annoy me.

That is to say that while the solution found by Google has a bunch of drawbacks, and I’d prefer if old games and unmaintained apps were left alone, I don’t think it was a totally wrong decision (this time).