You can still be sued. At that point, you either: a) defend yourself as normal, while attempting to maintain anonymity (difficult & doesn't solve anything) b) let the case go to default judgement (for likely an enormous amount of money) at which point Nintendo has every reason to try to track you down in real life, and can use the courts to help them do so. Hope you were really, really thorough about your anonymity.

It can be a resume piece. Having been in these communities (server emulation instead of console) you find some insanely bright developers in them. A lot of them don't have a formal education background, but are willing to build out well thought out pieces of software. You just have to do the research on them if they tell you this is who they are, a lot of the times you can find out plenty about how they code and design things out in the open. I'd probably almost always hire such a dev if their code seemed good, and I knew they cared about the quality of their code. Having been involved in those communities though I do know there are awful devs who don't care about what anyone says "my code aint broken" types who never give credit when you help them either (reputation / respect matters more when you're coding for free in some of these communities).

Because making an emulator takes a lot of work. And emulator devs want some compensation for this work - be it money (in form of donations) or a status that could help them gather followers or even land a job.

If you want Patreonbux for your work it has to be tied to a real person (or a real legal entity which is tied to real people)