Any pirate with a decent bone in their body will respect FLOSS license requirements, as they're mostly there to weaponize the copyright system against proprietary software devs.

That's fundamentally different to how corporations use copyright law. When you fuck over free software you're fucking over the people who're fighting fire with fire.

Lastly, many emulator/homebrew devs specifically rip their own ROMs and dont get involved in illegal distribution of ROMs to keep their projects legal. Lot easier to stick on a resume that way.