Was your emulation done with qemu user space emulator[1] (the syscall translation layer) or qemu system emulator[2] (the VM)? If it was qemu-system you might have better numbers with qemu-user-static, which does binary translation similar to Rosetta 2 rather than a being a full system emulator with all its overhead.

You can probably use qemu-user-static to translate x86-64-only binaries in a Linux container on an ARM machine, too, but I have never tried.

[1]: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/user/main.html

[2]: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/index.html