@whitequark one of the things i've run into enough times is that binfmt-misc emulators contaminate cross-compilation builds.
if you have a bad cross process that runs newly-compiled programs for "host", it should fail and have you fix it. but if you have binfmt-misc emulator for that the problem gets papered over.
being able to force each nix build sandbox into the correct (possibly empty) set of emulators would be a great feature to have