why would that matter?

... Why would it not?

because AOT and JIT take care of it.

Because that’s a solved problem, and isn’t relevant to this article - which I assume you also did not read

Both MacOS and Windows handle that pretty well with JIT, AOT or emulation

This is a valid answer for 90% of people's use.

It still kinda makes me sad that the discussion always stops there. It will still break some of whole classes of programs, it's not magic and can either be finicky or just too limited.

From the top of my head USB and peripheral access in general is a PITA every time a translation layer is added. Raw device access in emulation never has worked "pretty well".

For Mac it wasn't that much of an issue because anyone with deeper hardware needs was probably not there in the first place. But on Windows I'd predict it will be a significant transition pain. A bigger share of people will stick on x86 basically forever to cover their long taily needs.

And you can use qemu-user on Linux, though I don't think any distros set it up by default

I’m guessing from your question you did not bother reading the article before commenting.

That said this is a solved problem - because plenty of people have arm based machines, and run x86 binaries on them (it obviously comes with a perf cost, but there’s only so much that can be done when dealing with poor engineering)

As a consumer maybe that's true, but as a developer and company making tech, you really can target arm or RISC-V if you care at all and it's not hard at all in a huge number of cases.