Android app dev since 10 years here - performance is absolutely fine. I have it running all the time. Granted, performance was abysmal before the accelerated Intel images, but that was many years ago.
Devs complaining about Android emulator performance usually have problems with their setup, common culprits: Not enough ram (it is a VM in the end), slow machine (eg. MacOS is bad for Android dev), broken VM acceleration (AMD was a problem for a while IIRC).
Accelerated intel images require you to be running an Intel Android install, not ARM like the vast (>95%? 99%?) majority of devices. We had a bug around the byte-size of "long" that only showed up on real hardware.
Devs complaining about Android emulator performance usually have problems with their setup, common culprits: Not enough ram (it is a VM in the end), slow machine (eg. MacOS is bad for Android dev), broken VM acceleration (AMD was a problem for a while IIRC).