The course demonstrated a lot about the Wokwi simulator. Uri also improved it each week (and continues to do so). The course also showed as good as all assembly pieces necessary to do the Pong game. Personally I do not hink you can learn by just cut-n-paste or typing in a listing, so of course I try to create my program from scratch with my variations.

My approach was/is planned to do most of the game in plain Arduino C, just to get comfortable with the Wokwi enviroment and Pong "hardware". Also it opens the possibility to "get a hint" by looking at the generated assembly listing. Lastly, it being easier to write in C, the structure and gameflow can be written and experimented with.

Lastly, my view is "but it worked in the simulator" means it is only proved correct when implemented in hardware. (As in : a mechanical model may work in 360solidworks, but not IRL)