I fully agree, a project should have as little ties to illegal content as it can, and yes the current system goes off of current legal law or at least how the judge/Jury interpret it. And that's where a lot of this issue comes to play.

It's quite clear in existing law that you are legally allowed to reverse engineer a piece of equipment that you have physically purchased, there is no argument on that. The issue occurs when you are reverse engineering something that has DRM because at that point you were breaking a security standard. This is also why most emulators are legal however ROMs are not, because while it's completely legal to reverse engineer a switch for example, the ability to bypass the DRM on the game itself in order to play the game is breaking a security standard which is not referenced in existing laws or backup laws.

This, in my opinion is the biggest issue with current laws, it makes no sense for me to be allowed to make a digital Archive of something that I have, but not be allowed to circumvent the security on the item itself in order to actually use the archive. Due to this it also means that ripping 4K and Blu-ray discs also are breaking a DRM which means you are legally not allowed to make a digital copy of movies that you own. Which directly contradicts the intent of these laws.

Of course I'm talking about in the US, other countries have a more lapse ideology for a data retention and archival purposes. Maybe someday as the younger Generations get older they will reapproach current dmca and copyright law and give exemption for personal use to allow breaking DRM, but until that happens expect every emulator is going to have this same exact claim every time