Bottom line, and in my opinion, among its contemporaries, the PCE provides the right canvas to accomplish the goals associated with creating a modern game with "vintage hardware" constraints in mind. These new games, in a lot of cases, surpass the hardware that inspired their design, such as Shovel Knight being inspired by a lot of NES classics, but being (probably) technically impossible to be accurately represented in that hardware. However, that game would fit really well as a Super CDROM. Same with Axiom Verge, Cave Story, etc.
In other words, modern game designers, who have the benefit of hindsight to create games that are inspired and in some cases, made to be artificially constrained, by the designs of old hardware, are creating games that seem to fit best with the technical capabilities of NEC's console, if they ever choose to do so. This seems to validate the design decisions their engineers made when putting it together as the "retro-ist" console.
People take stupid shit, such as video games, too seriously.