Of course there is academic interesting (as in, I wrote an emulator in BASH and it actually kinda works) and there is practical interesting (I got the emulator to be 3% faster).

The Rust community really has an interest in showing the world that it is a serious candidate to replace C++. That's why we see a preponderance of "this same problem, but solved in Rust" - they're providing another data point to show that Rust can work in a problem space that had previously been the sole domain of C/C++. In that regard, I would think it interesting.