For an arcade can't you get away with mounting the screen vertically by hiding the rest of it in the cabinet?
On some machines, yes. Not on a sit down machine where your legs go under the screen, and there's stuff on top of the screen.
Maaaaaaaaybe, this machine could get by with an ultra-wide screen, because it's got two player stations next to each other with a partition in the middle, but that's a big maybe. Plus I'd need something to link the two independently clocked video feeds into a single wide display.
I've got arcade machines that want 25" 4:3 monitors, and maybe MicroLED could fill the void. A suitable CRT would be best, but those are hard to find. Modern displays don't come in 4:3 at that size, and specialty 1:1 displays are too expensive for me to even measure to see if they'd fit.