Here's my experience up to now on mac:
- If you are looking for emulators for dev, there is no appropriate one with debugger that are native
- most native ones (nestopia) that I'm aware were ported by
Richard Bannister. They are working but maybe old by now. I don't know it other than nes one have debuggers
- fceux sdl version is available with homebrew if you need one for quick testing
- if you need debuggers, you need to use wine with fceux-32 win, nintendulator
- or if you use java then you can use nintaco but don't have much experience with it yet
- Mesen "work" but cannot run with mono because of mono winform support is still with carbon 32 and doesn't work with latest version of os
- I think mesen did work with wine but debugger was unfortunately slow (thus my reason to use my old winpc instead) and for some reason my main partition has a borked wine and cannot find the cause
- I do not have experience with openEmu (remember the name, don't remember why I was not using it) but I may try it out now to know what it offer
As for toolchain, since everything can run from bash, what runs on linux/wsl should run without issue on a mac usually. As long you have homebrew you should be fine. If not, you can always compile it if source available.
If I remember anything else I will be more than happy to update it. If you have any question, don't hesitate to ask
edit:
Just did a quick test of openEmu and when you try nes (inside famicom category) its need to download a "core" to make it work. In that case, it uses the Nestopia one. Seems to be a nice emulator "frontend" (I don't know if this is accurate to say that way) to play multiple console and would be more resent that Richard's one but no debugger. But still, it may be useful to play games since there is not much emulators like this one on the mac.