For the purists I understand them wanting the original consoles, but personally I'm just tired of having crap lying around which I might use once or so and then never again so for me emulation serves me perfectly. Plus, for those who live in PAL regions (Europe/Australia) they're stuck buying PAL copies which were slowed down or have to import from overseas and that might not be a cheap hobby for them.
Heh, that's like a Baby Mode playing it on PAL. xD
Sonic 1 is a bad example of PAL games, but a great example of a terrible port. Most PAL games may run at 50 fps but the game logic itself has been sped up so that everything still happens at the correct speeds ingame. They just didn't bother to do that in a bunch of games, like Sonic 1. Sonic 2 and 3 for example play at the correct speed even on PAL.
All that said, I prefer original hardware when possible since many consoles have character that most emulators still don't capture. For example audio usually doesn't sound correctly as the soundfonts are handled differently by the DAC and AMP than they are on PC or whatever. Usually not a big difference but a difference nonetheless. In other cases emulation just isn't perfect yet. Rendering a game at 4k is worthless if shaders don't work correctly and a transparency effect just ends up being a pink garbled mess. Some accessories also still don't work with emulators (yet) so a few games have to be played on real hardware.
But I'll still gladly emulate games if necessary, my Analogue Pocket is my go-to choice for most Gameboy games and I can play a whole load of romhacks on it that aren't compatible with my real hardware, like NTSC NES games. And in general sometimes wanting to play outside of my apartment means it'll be on the steam deck instead of my consoles for the sake of convenience.
There's no wrong way to play videogames, apart from cloud gaming.