AFAIUI the legal gray area with PSX emulation (and many other consoles) wasn't limited to just the ROMs, but also the console BIOS. Most emulators would tell you to dump (or find) your own.

Is that still the case, or are there free/libre reimplementations of these consoles' BIOS images out there now?

Seems like they offload the responsibility of ROMs to the user (good) but no mention of the BIOS part.