I think one thing that's easy to forget, some of the old school emulation, like early SNES emulators, came about when the hardware was still kinda current or recent.
The SNES was released in Japan in 1990. The first SNES emulator in 1994 could run a few homebrews; I'd say SNES emulation proper started in perhaps 1996 with Snes96, but that's a judgement call.
The Switch was released in 2017. We are in 2022 now.
I think one thing that's easy to forget, some of the old school emulation, like early SNES emulators, came about when the hardware was still kinda current or recent.