it's not at all about "quality of programmer" and you should never reduce extremely vague arguments to that. it's literally about time for quality program to be made an completed.
those C++ emulators have often been in development for 3-5x as long as a similar Rust one.
Many people are still learning Rust and an emulator is probably a good way to get your hands dirty.
I'm doing something similar with a compiler project and my code is gradually getting better and more idiomatic.
But I'm still doing a lot of stupid things and getting the hang of it.