From what I understand the dmca backup issue only comes into play when it involves emulation, yeah, because you either need to reproduce the decryption mechanism or bypass it, and both could be argued to be “circumvention of encryption” which comes into play on the DMCA stuff.
I managed to get into Stardew after some insistence, but I also struggled with this for a long time and I know exactly why in my case after coming back to harvest moon for a bit: the player character is too slow. You spend soooo much time walking and unlike HM/RF you don’t have a sprint button, so everything becomes more stressful to do.