Some years ago, I happened to be working somewhere with a bunch of analog-to-digital conversion equipment, and as a favor to a friend I offered to digitize a bunch of tapes of old home movies. About 2/3 where VHS-C tapes of this kind, which my friend provided along with an adapter. While all the footage was very much VHS-quality (with all the AV artifacts that entails), I was still able to pull just about all the footage without any real difficulty, despite most of the tapes being 20-30 years old. Now, I can definitely imagine things going wrong (e.g. the tape-threading system in the adapter being misaligned), and you could only really digitize in real time (so the process just ran in the background at work for about a week). But compared to trying to wrangle old digital AV equipment, I have to say I was impressed by how straightforward that approach felt.

I thought you meant that the adapter was an "unreliable narrator" because it was being puppet-controlled from the inside by a second, secret tape.