Dropping 32bit support was the right decision. Most of those games work fine in emulation on Apple Silicon if they are single player, or alternatively in a cloud gaming service like Nvidia's that you can use to access your Steam library directly.
Well, as I said, about half my library is gone due to the lack of 32 bit support. The entire Orange Box by Valve, a few indie games...
Not sure if many of them are even available in emulators, and a cloud gaming service for a 2D indie game seems like overkill.
And yes, I generally agree with Apple deprecating technologies after a while (sometimes it's better to make a clear cut by forcing a minimum API version, CPU architecture etc. rather than to have compatibility be hit and miss for really old things), but in the case of gaming specifically, I sometimes prefer Microsoft's approach.
There are also tools like CrossOver[1] or even free tools like Wine that work reasonably well, 2D games should not have an issue. People have played TF2 in Wine on Apple Silicon. So while half your Steam library won't run directly, it's not like it's gone forever. Parallels is also an option.
