I think I first used it around 2004ish. It was barely useful with basic applications without doing work, you could use it to have fairly decent support once you figured out the process. I think I was able to get an SNES emulator and a barely stable N64 emulator to run.
It was basically a best last option if you needed to run a windows program and couldn’t/wouldn’t do a dual boot.
So yeah, they definitely improved things.
You can’t be too sure. Last thing anyone wants is someone to get ahold of their legendary Pepes.