I think people who are doing these decomps aren't necessarily passionate about them to that extent. If they were a huge fan of the history of Sonic, they could use the resources now available to see how the game works, but they would also be internally driven to go beyond just a dump of the game's code on a repo. AI cannot decompile the social history of these games and the stories of the people who made them. It's just a matter if the person actually cares about that. Who knows what drives such an unusual amount of passion.

I feel a lot of these decomps were created by people not as passionate as your examples, because they are only showing up now, not in the pre-AI era. There is a flood of AI decomps only now because AI has lowered the barrier enough to where a project a person could not be passionate enough about to spend years of their limited time on Earth toiling on it is now easily accomplishable. It's a huge ask to put years of your life towards one thing. People might have obligations, work, family, children, more important hobbies, yet still wish one day they could get around to that one project, but couldn't find a way of prioritizing it over other things. I can't fault them for that. Now they can get it done in a month and still have time for other things that matter to them.

The claim is "we lose the rich communities that only exist from manual work." I still think the people who want those communities, like the people who still create art by hand in spite of the existence of diffusion, will keep doing their own thing. They were going to from the start, AI or not, but now that AI is a thing the separation is clearer to people on the outside, since they are seen to not rely on AI.

The communities that will appear because we can now organize AI decomp projects wouldn't have appeared at all with the barrier so high, had it not been easy enough to start them. The blocker was other obligations and not having the time to devote that was intrinsically required to finish them by hand, with the vast majority of people still being a member of outer society.

Dare I say it, maybe not all of the people into reverse engineering really enjoyed the process. It's just they put up with learning it because if you wanted to modernize an abandoned game in the pre-AI era, you had no choice but to learn those things. Only the people with the interest and patience remained, and those are the examples we are able to point to, while the people with only enough passion to get it done with AI assistance left a while ago and are only now reappearing.