I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.

It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).

>unfathomable number of games that were released

One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.