It's worse than you think. They're forcing the OpenGL into games (and also emulators) that don't need it and used to run fine with just software rendering on computers from 20 years ago.
Here's just one example. This version runs great on my slow armv7 board that boots /dev/fb0 at 640x480, without the proprietary Mali GPU driver.
So anyway, now I archive old versions of the games and emulators I like, and ignore all the new ones.