There were the main focus if you had a weak PC not able to run the latest games, something rather common back then. I mean completely not be able to run a game, not just play on 15-20 fps.
There was no way you were a PC player and had not heard about or tried emulation.
Everyone's experience is different. With all of the 2d PC games out there during the 5th-gen era, there would have been no need to go to emulation if your computer was older; you could just play some of the many 2d PC games.
Myself, I didn't own any consoles other than handhelds until late 1999 but we did have PCs, and while I had heard of emulation (that first N64 emulator (UltraHLE) is the first one I remember really paying attention to, though I never did try it), it wasn't until the '00s that I actually used any emulators. Whether our computers were newer or aging, which of course changes over time, I played computer games, not emulated old arcade games. I've still got my big-box PC game collection.
Part of why is because I wanted to play legit games, not illegal downloads, but even for people who did want to download games, remember, downloading things was nontrivial for a lot of people in the '90s; dialup is slow and often drops your connection... it was some time after I got POD before I could finally download that 30+MB patch that makes the OEM version into the retail one, for example.
Emulation at that time was also a counter-measure against all that focus on 3D.
Huh? As I said, many popular PC games of the late '90s to early '00s were 2d games. Starcraft is one of the most popular games ever regardless of its 2d graphics, and the first two Diablo games, Civilization III and below, The Sims 1, SimCity3000, C&C: Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, etc etc... there were a lot of very popular 2d games in the later '90s to early '00s.
Now, over time more and more games and genres slowly did go 3d, and graphics have always mattered a lot on the PC so I'm sure there was a 3d bias. There certainly was a "dated graphics" bias, for either 2d or 3d, no question. But for an anti-2d bias in particular, I really think that it wasn't as strong as the 2d-hating stereotype you see from the N64 and Playstation. I do not remember Diablo 2 or Red Alert 2 being criticized too harshly for their 2d graphics in 2000 when they released, for example. And additionally, in genres like strategy games, while 3d had an appeal, it also led to problems, particularly in game cameras. For example, it took years before I accepted the idea of a decent polygonal 3d RTS, my favorite genre at the time! I disliked most of the polygonal RTSes I played in the '90s, either because of bad 3d cameras (moving 3d cameras in RTSes does not work well, I have always thought) or other issues. It was only with Conquest: Frontier Wars in 2001 that I finally found one that was great, and it solved the problem by sticking to a classic overhead camera, and only using the polygons for the graphics. Warcraft 3 would do the same, after Blizzard tried but thankfully abandoned the idea of a more mobile 3d camera.
So yeah, personally, I thought 3d was pretty cool, but never hated 2d either.
No major company backed that project. The opposite. They even tried to shut them down. There were just individual developers and groups, most of them doing it on their spare time. But it was evident that there was a market for the older games. The advantage you had on PC as opposed to consoles at that time, was that there was more room left to explore an alternative way. While on consoles you were forced to go with the latest trends.
Well, computers are open platforms, so anyone can make whatever they want for them. That is their great strength.