I'm mostly responding to this comment in another thread https://www.speedrun.com/posts/e679s where the response to "why no emulation" was:

There is way too much room for cheating in emulators

I get what is being said here, but what is the point of moderation if not this. If there is no advantage, then why not allow it? It could be its own category, I feel like a lot of n64 games allow emulation in this way.

I guess I'm confused with the spirit of the ruling, as it seems exclusionary for kind of no reason. Especially as time moves forward the barrier to entry gets higher and higher if you only allow for original hardware.