It does seem a bit strange given the overall focus on power consumption and battery life. Surely emulation is a very heavy tax on the hardware? Imagine what it could do with software running natively.

Well, the creator chose to use a regular ESP32, which is Xtensa based, and is poorly suited for this type of application.

It's really weird anyways because the ESP32 fairly old nor as useful as something like the C6 which on paper could run Linux but without floating point.