Here's what I've determined...

In my testing, the last commit that didn't experience the status bar display bug was "d137585" The issue appears to begin with "1b6a029"

The last commit to retain the game's original aspect ratio was "4f97927" The stretched widescreen look begins with "c708329" Based on a casual glance at the details of the latter commit, I think the stretched image is not intended.

I don't currently have a Atlassian/Bitbucket account to report these issues, so if anyone from RetroPie does have an account already and feels like reporting these two issues, it would be much appreciated. It looks like the active Repo on Bitbucket doesn't currently accept reporting of Issues, so I don't know if it is possible to let the Devs know about these issues.

As far as the need for triplicate (identical) files for each of: audiohed, auidiot, vgadict, vgagraph, and vgahead - one for each episode of the "Spear of Destiny" expansion pack... I don't know what to say. Those were not necessary when I first installed Wolf4SDL, way back in 2021. For that matter, ECWolf (a fork of Wolf4SDL, if I'm not mistaken) only requires one of each, as far as I can tell, from my testing of it on Windows. Not sure if the Wolf4SDL Devs really intended this, but it seems like an odd choice if they did.

My Retropie Setup.