Tbh, is it really pirating if I bought the game and wanted to play it on a different unofficial platform?

I understand the main thing was Yuzu was apparently offering builds that work with unreleased games (which how tf does that work) via Patreon, but if the game’s been released and I bought it, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to download a ROM or even dump my own and play it on an emulator that offers better performance.

Yeah, fighting open source emulators is kind of like fighting a hydra. People will fork the project and one of those will probably emerge as the alternative to Ryujinx. At the same time Nintendo did manage to get an entire team of developers to exit the Switch emulation scene under penalty of breaching the settlement. It's not going to kill Switch emulation, but they did manage to take down one of the most popular ones.