In this case (AAA games) the people who write the code and produce the assets don't "own it." Capital investors do. 

IP is mostly a legal convention for the convenience and perpetuation of the current economic system and not something indisputably morally good. I personally think it is okay or even good that people decompile game code or any code really when the alternative is that capitalists control and gatekeep the access thereof. 

Again, legally it is a different matter, but most so-called moral justifications for IP rights are post-hoc justifications after the fact of its existence and not something upon which these laws were constructed from first principles. IP exists because it benefits the dominant political-economy. Everything else is to rationalize that.

Originally copyright and IP were 'invented' to wrangle control from the publishers who enjoyed a permanent monopoly before 1695. (Stationer's monopoly) The statute of Ann (1710) put the legal right in the hands of the author. The "work made for hire" doctrine screwed it all up thanks to the supreme court of the US in 1903 resulting in the copyright act of 1909 and further rights given to employers with the copyright act of 1976 making a distinction between employees and contractors.

It was a good idea at the beginning, but corrupted by capitalism. 

It's still useful to protect small indies though. When I started as a software developer we were just a small company and getting out hard work freely distributed added to us having to close our second office. Then we started encrypting our data and adding copy protection. Later we got burned again by patent litigation and then had to file our own patents to avoid getting sued as the only defense there was counter offense ending in a stale mate...

But yep, patents nowadays are mostly to further enrich corporations. The worst is in the medical field. Politics tried to wrestle control from publishers, yet corporations started lobbying and using the political system to further enrich themselves. 

Anyway, originally copyright was only supposed to last 14 years. Emulating and modding 14+ year old games, perfectly fine with me, 2012 and before, Abandonware as far as I'm concerned, should enter the public domain after 14 years.
https://cspd.law.duke.edu/publicdomainday/shrinking/

Yet emulating/modding/decompiling/copying anything newer, that really should be up to the creator of the work, not just because we can.

I could get behind this if by creator we mean the workers (individually or associatively) who produced a thing, and not the proprietors who have captured control over that thing, and if an IP can't be owned indefinitely by re-releasing new products in a common franchise. The IP should be sufficiently novel to get the protection. 

Although I'd rather just ditch IP in way of an extensive distributed prize system or gift economy anyway, and allow people to play freely with ideas, as we had done hundreds of thousands of years before IP was invented. The sort of experimentation we're seeing currently with decomps of newer games isn't any more harmful than fanfiction, in my opinion. 

There are also scenarios where violating an IP has led to preservation (i.e PT.) I especially don't think people or companies have a (moral) right to prevent the distribution of an IP if they no longer distribute it themselves.

Sure, capturing of control was never meant to happen, copyright was supposed to ensure the opposite. And yeah IP law takes it too far. A specific work should be protected for a limited amount of time from plagiarism and unlawful copying, but not an idea. Doom clones have led to wonderful new games as well as many mods of games.

Anyway it's ridiculous you basically still have to pay the grandchildren of the original creator for using a piece of music or movie clip. Same with corporations. Black and white Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willie) finally entered public domain 2 years ago. 95 years is the current term!

The general rule in information security seems to be that if an adversary has control of the hardware, it's a lost cause anyway. You can delay the inevitable, but you can't prevent it. It does not apply at all to e.g. banking, where the adversary doesn't have access to the servers. Also: can't beat math, AI or not. Quantum computing might be more problematic, but there's already solutions cooking, and might even be ready.

Anyway, this "delaying the inevitable" perspective makes me think that one of the reasons why there's console generations is resettingthe security side: by the time a platform is cracked wide open, it'll be outdated anyway. Obviously that doesn't seem true anymore with the advent of AI.