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You need it for a CRT shader, but games pretty much universally were in RGB internally and got converted on the way out. Especially for MAME, which is emulating games that would use RGB monitors.

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I think MAME emulates some hardware for which NTSC artifact colors were important:

https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apple_II (which had no RGB at all)

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenEmu/comments/hhxnry/sharing_my_... (showing Sonic, among others, though I'm not sure if this is really about NTSC artifacting or just dithering)

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,152465.msg15...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/NTSC_Filters

So, there are some exceptions, including a few extremely popular platforms, but certainly you are correct that emulating the majority of game platforms does not need NTSC artifacting.

For arcade, yes, but MAME does do consoles as well in both NTSC and PAL formats. MAME has a pretty high-quality MegaDrive/Genesis driver, for instance.

Genesis was RGB internally and supports RGB out, like I think every console generation after the Atari. PAL conversions were just about framerate.

https://www.retrorgb.com/genesis.html

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