While it's interesting to read such a nice success story, you should be more discrete with showing off your stash. Consider to edit your disclosed wallet amount, though the cats are already out of the bag.

I once had to recover an old Bitcoin Core wallet from 2014 which I nearly lost due to a dying harddisk (I wasn't very backup savvy back then). But I knew that there were far less coins in it. Anyway, so sats deserve to be lost. Once my harddrive showed signs of failure and surface read errors, I quickly saved a ddrescue image of it and saved it for later recovery. For reasons that I won't disclose, this recovery started years later (I don't complain...).
Contrary to your experience I had more trouble to load my wallet.dat in more recent versions of Bitcoin Core. My route was to gradually update my Bitcoin Core step by step starting from the Bitcoin Gui version which I last ran in 2014 to more recent ones until I arrived to the then current version a few years ago. My path was probably more tedious than yours, maybe not necessary at all, but in the end me too arrived at a current wallet file version which I was able to transfer to a HD wallet with mnemonic recovery words as backup.

Be carefull with your coins and don't talk about it! You might want to read the PDF at https://smartcustody.com


Yepp, you have the fork coins in addition to your BTC, but make sure to first move away your real BTC before you use your old private keys to claim the fork coins. I have done that, too.