That's a solid approach, and for high-level logic, it's definitely the way to go.

I find that a lot of my development time is actually spent on lower-level tasks—like writing custom string operations—since we don't have the rich standard libraries of a host environment.

This is exactly where an emulator really shines for me. It enables a "device-less" workflow where I can work through those low-level details on a sofa at a cafe without needing to bring the physical hardware along just to verify the behavior.