I mean, can one use it like one would use Catalina - internet surfing, etc ?
Well no, of course not. But then, neither are Tiger or Leopard, not really. While Tenfourfox and related projects are keeping the light on, things like Youtube are a struggle. That said, there is a lot of software that never made the leap to OSX. Some never even made it away from the Motorola 68k. And, even the stuff that made it to OSX during the transition tended to be carbon instead of rebuilt completely from scratch.
Even if it was rebuilt from scratch, if an App made it all the way from OS 9.2.2 to 10.0, if it's not in active development now, even if it somehow made it to 32-bit x86, it's not going to be 64-bit. Apple keeps on leaving very good software stuck in the past, and personally, nothing really beats real hardware at reaching back into the past.
With fairly recent developments, QEMU can run OS 9.2 and 10.4, maybe even 10.5, but without a gpu, and generally without sound. Sheepshaver looks to be more or less done being developed, but that only gets you to 9.0, and again, without a gpu.
Personally speaking, I keep my eMac running 10.4 for the most part, and my PMG5 running 10.5. The eMac is too slow to even really try to do much that is modern, but it's all worth it for that wonderful CRT. My PMG5 is surprisingly capable, even if it's just a 2.0ghz dual cpu model. But whatever future it's going to have getting online is really in the form of linux. It's a 64-bit system, and that seems to give it options that a G4 doesn't have.
And yet, I wish it supported Jaguar. Earlier models did, and 10.2 had a better implementation of classic support, from everything I've read and tested on my eMac, it seems to simply runs classic apps more or less perfectly.
At the end of the day, there just isn't a perfect mac. It all comes down to what you want to run. Even if my PMG5 offered me the support I wanted, there'd still be about 10-15 years worth of software made after the transition that it will never see. 10.5 can't even access iCloud natively. Its version of Safari is painfully ancient, and while there is a 3rd party upgrade, that's horribly unstable. There's absolutely no support for 3rd party internet services, not unless I count "using a web browser to reach them" as support.
But I got it because there were just so many games mocking me with their need for a G5, or even just something running faster than a 700mhz G4. Anything else was extra.
