Bit of a tangent, but a thing that has absolutely rekindled that sense of exploring a thing at a time instead of being frozen by choice is Retroachievements.org.

Not only is tracking progress and having leaderboards inherently promoting that in the first place but they have a bunch of community events pointing people at interesting stuff. And they add game coverage one by one, so just looking at the “what’s new” space is a surprisingly fun tool for discovering things you missed, although I imagine jumping in today does that less, since they have almost full coverage of older platforms at this point.

Still, if that’s an issue you feel you’ve been having, I recommend messing with it for that purpose.