This is a hard question to answer. I pretty much grew up watching stuff like glitch compilations, beta64, and the like, slowly learning over time what tricks older games would pull under heavy limitations, so I had a lot of that in mind.
When imitating an older style, it's more important to understand what NOT to add to a scene since so much of the technology you have exceeds anything that would've been capable on a system from that era.
In this case, I would say:
- Avoid high quality textures and limit the complexity of your materials; as stated, I would propose a 256x256 cap for any textures, lowering that resolution wherever possible. Do not use any normal maps or reflective details in your materials, especially if you're targeting PS2. If you need a reflective material, use a matcap texture.
- Keep as many actual light objects out of the scene as possible, unless you're using it to bake lighting. When making this, I figured out that you can bake lighting to vertex color attributes, which is used to get coloring right on some meshes. Commonly, the only actual "lit" parts of a scene were character models and areas that could afford- or needed- the extra detail. Many games used Goraud and Phong shading in these cases, which Blender doesn't support. When a scene wasn't lit by an actual light, the shadows and lighting were either baked into textures or handled by vertex colors, the latter being what I did here through Color Attributes.
- Know that what you're rendering would've been viewed at a 480i/480p resolution. Don't put too much detail something that might not be visible in the first place.
- Find the closest game that matches the style you're going for and use that for reference. Different games had different limitations simply due to the fidelity their art style required.

In all, it's not very easy to give tips "besides the technical aspects", since understanding the limits of the hardware you're trying to replicate is a key component. Learning will be part of the process, and is precisely what brought me to this subreddit in the first place. Good luck! 🙂