As someone who grew up with Nesticle and ZSNES as a kid and now uses OpenEMU, the icons and visual flare are big reasons lots of people use specific emulators. ZSNES is still used by a lot of people because it's "comfy" despite the accuracy being poor.

Kids downloading emulators today and experiencing 40 year old consoles like the NES and 50 year old consoles like the Atari 2600 for the first time don't want an all text UI. They want a picture of that ancient hardware. It makes their experience feel more real. In contrast, Retroarch is that it's an emulator frontend designed that has no frills in its UI, and it's designed with a mindset that everything doesn't take up much space, everything provides value, and color schemes aren't all over the place, and there aren't really any icons. And because it's the ideal HN emulator, it's difficult to use and ugly.