It's understandable that they went in this direction. Higan/bsnes has already captured the market for "accuracy" on the SNES emulator front, so this is more going off and doing its own thing rather than re-treading familiar ground.

I suppose my only concern is what it will do to the hardware requirements, since ZSNES' original claim to fame was how well it was able to run on limited hardware, even if it had to do a bunch of clever hacks to get there.

Impressive, but oh man, the transition from the original ZSNES User Interface from my childhood to the UI of Super ZSNES was jarring to say the least. Nostalgia is powerful:

https://imgur.com/a/R63BKTe

The widescreen mode is surprisingly functional, wow