As someone who owns most of the consoles, has Pvm etc don’t play the scalpers game just emulate. Thankfully the bubble has burst on a lot of markets, and we’re seeing more reasonable prices, but the OG hardware can only last so long. If anything grab a controller for each system you love, even saying that, 8bitdo have really stepped up, and I would say surpassed a lot of the old first party ones.
It helps that emulators have caught up in the last ten years. When I started collecting consoles there wasn’t a good emulator for the Saturn and even emulating the snes on a mobile device with similar power to a pi was inaccurate at times.
I have less and less reason to want to use original hardware other than nostalgia.
The used game market is still insane, I’m seeing $20-30 for even shit-tier, obscure, normally worthless nes games. If you bought the console while it was new it’s still worth keeping, but absolutely just get a flash cart instead of subjecting yourself to the price gouging retro market.