Correcto. Which means Steam will probably drop 32 bit libs soon. Which means Ubuntu will stop shipping 32 libs. The era is truly coming to an end
Let’s call it “soonish”. The old proton versions still need 32 bit libs if they do not backport the feature.
Old Proton builds probably won’t backport this (unless it’s completely isolated, idk the code layout of Wine). But are old Proton builds still necessary? Occasionally there’s regressions, but are there really any games that require like a 2 year old Proton build?
There are, but it’s complicated. Doom (2016) for instance - it doesn’t handle the very large Vulkan swap chain that’s possible on some modern graphics cards, crashes on start-up. Someone patched Proton around that time so that Doom would start; the patch was later reverted since it broke other games. Other games based off of that engine - couple of Wolfensteins, Doom Eternal - have the problem fixed in the binaries, and so run on up-to-date Proton, but depending on your hardware, only a few specific, old, versions of Proton, will do for Doom.
Regressions get fixed - that’s okay. Buggy behaviour which depended on regressions that got fixed - that’s a problem.