i know iso loaders blow disc times out of the water, but if I had an SSD, wouldn't my load times on emulator be similarly fast?

Is it because of that supposition all the run made with an emulator have been rejected after been accepted so long?

I use an SSD and i have some lag with dolphin, do not seem to be an advantage.

What a shame. Only got PAL consoles here, so my only chance at closing in on the times here was with the NTSC-version on emulator.

For Super Monkey Ball 1 it doesn't matter whether you are using PAL/NTSC. There are very few differences and it only effects the speedrun by 1 second at most and that's only in Expert/Master. The world record used to be held on a PAL copy, so there is no need to emulate the NTSC version at all.

There has been a lot of controversy about ISO loaders in the past. Although it only really had an effect on the loading times, which aren't very crucial in this game as there are very few loads, and all of which aren't very long. This didn't stop people complaining about it though, and it was mainly discussed about Super Monkey Ball 2, due to story mode having a lot of loads. Eventually it was decided to just ban ISO loader runs completely because of the faster loading times.

Emulators have been banned because the emulators do not accurately run the game as it is on console.