It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as proposing new f

It's an issue because there's completely mutually exclusive conceptions of emergence that take you in potentially ridiculous directions, such as proposing new fundamental physics, violations of what we normally think of as causality, etc, and it has a funny way of showing up in arenas that are notorious for woo and mysticism, such as quantum mechanics, or consciousness, or explanations of how morality 'really' works, it seems to bring with it an entirely new idea of what it means to even explain something. Depending on which variant of emergentism people are talking about at different times, they could be talking about something that's fully consistent with the reductionistic program, something that's not making new claims but is just about levels of description, something that's vague but not obviously wrong, or some profound revelation proposing we overturn everything we thought we knew about physics or some natural phenomena or anything in between. The stakes are either utterly trivial, or as profound as they could possibly get. And depending on who you talk to about emergence at any given moment, you'll get a confident answer that could potentially fall anywhere on that spectrum, or worse, a strange kind of passiveness where this issue is kind of handwaved away.