In the early days of emulation, there were tons of low-quality and imprecise emulator backends. If you wanted to play a dozen SNES games, you usually needed a half-dozen emulators to get them all to boot to the main menu. They were disparate efforts usually led by 1 or 2 people that wanted to get a Super Famicom game to run, and then gave up on implementing or fixing support for other games.

We live in a golden age of emulation because that attitude died out. With more powerful computers (and less hack-oriented development) it became possible to properly emulate a complete console with a high level of accuracy. For preservationist purposes, accurate emulation is much more important than being the first to emulate a game, or even being able to decompile it. The only reason that we can point and laugh at low-quality efforts like Nintendo Switch Online is because the community cares even more than Nintendo did. The reason Wine/DXVK/Proton works so well is because it didn't fracture itself into a thousand downstream forks to fix one specific game. It's a holistic effort.

A lot of the hand-wringing comes from a justified place that doesn't want to see emulation backslide into a bazaar-like community. You're free to disagree with their logic and vibe-code a thousand game decomps, but in all likelihood emulation will be a more popular choice for the foreseeable future. Lots of people emulate stuff on their iPhone or Steam Deck, almost nobody is playing a game decomp on it though. I can't imagine AI tipping the scales on decomp popularity, especially among average Joes.