Emulators are emulating N64hardware running a game pak, this is a native port of the game to Linux and unlocks several benefits. Off the top of my head:
Improved performance due to running natively on the hardware (not emulating an N64 with 4MB RAM)
Ability to set custom resolutions (widescreen), apply aliasing, filtering or other graphical tweaks
Easier to replace textures, models, audio files and otherwise tweak the codebase
I've jumped. My old Win10 PC doesn't have a modern enough CPU to support Windows11, and after having seen what MS are doing with it I wasn't interested in upgrading anyway. I used to use Ubuntu back in my younger days at school so I'm not completely alien to Linux, but I'd turned my back on it in favour of Microsoft productivity suites after moving into the full time work arena. Once support ended for Win10 I flattened my hard disks and made the move.
While I do have Ubuntu/Debian experience, I ultimately decided against going down that path because I'm not too happy with the recent decisions Canonical has made. Plus, I'm a gamer deep down and was interested to see what gaming on Linux looks like nowadays (my last attempt was a half-assed install of Left4Dead 2 when Valve were just figuring things out), so I ultimately settled on CachyOS. Going from Ubuntu and Gnome through 10 years of Windows to land at Arch and KDE has been one hell of a journey and I'm surprised by how little I know in this environment. It is NOT like riding a bike, a few years away really feels like learning from scratch again!
Things are going well though. I'm running Steam/Heroic with a bunch of games installed (Proton 😍), I'm back with LibreOffice and GIMP (though I never really stopped using GIMP), and I'm learning a bunch of new terminology and apps. It doesn't matter that because of forced obsolescence there's no way back to MS, I'm only interested in going forward anyway.
It's not 1 specific game but 1 genre - competitive online multiplayer titles. OP lists 2 such games. They're not what I play but to each their own.
Enjoying a particular genre of games together as a group doesn't make make for a weak relationship. The fact OP plays a range of titles regularly with a group of friends suggests the opposite to me.
But it is in Europe