Once upon a time, in a world of thick clients and client applications, BDE was a great and powerful tool allowing to simply and visually build an application.
That time has passed.
Now BDE is a vestigial of that glorious past and a limitation to grow an application past 32bits and locally shared databases.
There was a request to recompile a Delphi7 application in order to run on Win10 and that's how this journey started. A newever Delphi was needed to build that code and in newer version there is no support for BDE.
That's how the BDE escape plan started.