Some archivists make decisions about what to archive. Something that isn't going to be runnable in the future would be a poor choice if you only have limited resources.
Also, some archivists have the choice to convert media. For example, rather than storing a Wordperfect document, perhaps it is best to convert to PDF. Rather than storing the ROM of an 80's arcade machine, or the whole machine, perhaps it is best to store an MPEG video of a playthrough. Rather than storing the data on a floppy disk in a filing cabinet, perhaps it is best to store the data on a server which will be kept up to date? Well resourced archives might be able to implement emulators - but then the question remains how should that be done - Is it okay to have a PDP11 emulator that runs on dos, emulated by dosbox in windows XP, emulated again by virtualbox on Windows 11?
A big part of being an archivist is making decisions of what to keep, what not to keep, what form to keep it in, and when to convert it.
There is no consensus - some archives knowingly keep data and software that they have no way to open/run, in the hope someone might bother in the future. Others keep dependency tables to ensure that they always have some combination of hardware and software to run/open any stored material.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we should focus on storing as many bytes of data of human endeavors as possible, and not worry about emulation/search/cataloging.
Future people will have better solutions to all these problems, and every bit of effort we put into organising our archives today is effort taken away from collecting more bytes.
This means that you care about byte counter instead of actual content.
For some hardware, the number of people who can make it work has already diminished a lot. You can gather some of the knowledge today, “future people” won't be able to. What's the use of collections of data that can't be used?
how do archivists have a say in this?