Patient gamers do not face a lot of disadvantages, but they do include (artificial) scarcity, waning official support and facing old-ass design choices that might not look very favourable anymore.

My problem with this is that once the game is 100% complete, do I want to still play just to see a different cosmetic?

I don’t really see this as an issue, but as a choice. Back in the day, games lasted a lot longer. Hell yes we wanted to play as Metal Sonic. The next best thing we had was replaying the game as just Sonic.