Yeah, I played and beat the whole Aleste collection of games on the white GG Micro.
It comes with a magnifier accessory in the shape of a micro CRTV you can attach to it, lay it over the screen, and makes things easier on the eyes. It didn't matter to me, I enjoyed the experience so I played it one way or the other.
There was a youtube user named Revo SEGA 8-Bit (whos YT channel has mysteriously
vanished) who is a french guy I spoke to in comments of his videos. One particular video was of him showing a short clip of GG Aleste 3 running the title screen on a SMS years before the conversion hack we know now, with a few glitches indicating that it wasn't fully finished. He said he had a Aleste GG micro he dumped the game from, but the rom was heavily encrypted. So I think that while yes, of course M2 would do that to protect their game, they would also take the chance to enhance the game for their in-house developed emulator, over it's capabilities on an actual Game Gear. After all, they showed themselves demonstrated it on XTwitter running on a Game Gear when they first developed it.
Since I have played both official versions and the Game Gear romdump, not the GG2SMS hack recently released, I strongly believe that there was an additional audio channel for the game supported by their emulator. The rom is missing sounds the official game has and I see no one else talking about this.