That's all well and good if true, but Patreon is based in the USA, so even if the people behind it aren't (which they presumably are, as the stated "Tropic Haze LLC" is also USA-based), they have to comply with the laws in that jurisdiction.
Creating a private copy and using it is absolutely legal. Breaching an "effective" copy protection scheme can be illegal, but "effective" is defined through case law, and can range from "DVD DRM isn't effective" to "rolling ciphers on YouTube are effective" depending on court.
Perhaps that's true, but not because it would be piracy. Backing up media for personal has a pretty strong fair use claim, so I don't think it should be considered copyright infringement.
But there is also the DMCA, and the anti-circumvention provision, which can be attributed a lot more to the user backing up their game than it can be to the developers of the emulator. But that wouldn't be the same thing as copyright infringement.
That said, if the"interoperability exception" applies to anything at all, I feel like it should apply here. You are circumventing copy protection mechanisms for the explicit purpose of interoperability with other software.
On moral grounds, I also have absolutely no qualms whatsoever with someone circumventing copy protection mechanisms to make a copy of a thing they bought to use for personal use. The fact that that could be potentially illegal at all is disgusting.
If only we had a universal way to easily distribute data, without need to heavily license it, instead opting for easily accessible licenses from reputable sources at market prices...
(we do, but torrents got a bad name)
Netflix was a success not because it was a streaming service with a license fee, but because it provided unfettered access to data for a small fee.
Of course, now there are AIs which can or will shortly be able to trivially reproduce most data formats, so that's a separate issue as far as that goes (and that's bad too, if AI spells the complete death of DMCA), but it really didn't need to be this complicated.
Make your brand well recognized, make your products easy to obtain, go after the pirates not the users. I own a switch and TBH a lot of my enthusiasm is pretty chilled by Nintendo's dickery - I'm less likely to purchase their products (and I'll elsewhere with non-Nintendo stuff - and Nintendo's stuff is honestly becoming a lot of locked down crap these days).
It's not piracy to play a game that you've backed up on different hardware than the original developers intended.