Anecdotally, but i played PF1 in a group in which no one ever owned any of the PF1 books. Yes, we all played 3x before, but we used only SRD for PF1.
How good or bad something looks depends mostly on personal frame of reference. If you never played any version of D&D or any TTRPG, you don't really have anything to compare it to, your frame of reference is empty, so even 30y old 2ed looks good.
If you don't really play latest AAA games on 75" 4K oled tv (consoles) or 34" 120Hz 4k gaming monitor (PC), lot's of older games look good enough to kill couple of hours.
Somebody mentioned that comparing TTRPGs to video games is like apples to oranges. I would beg to differ. They both fall in the same category - hobby/leisure time activity/entertainment. Yes, there is social aspect and game aspect. But my regular weekly futsal game with guys from work has that too, game aspect and social aspect. In the end, all those things compete for the same resource - free time.