I seem to play obscure games that are expensive in console form but have official digital releases on a Nintendo VC or PC. If instead all you've played the game on is an inaccurate unofficial emulator, should you be judging all platforms? Is the situation game and community dependent? I'd like there to be at least one mod who owns the release I'm speedrunning on so that they're familiar with the load times and could reproduce a glitch to determine if the platform has too much of a glitch advantage or is the result of cheating.

Ideally, a game's moderator(s) would (collectively) be very knowledgeable of all versions of the game so any version specific differences would be known at verification time. In reality, many games have less runners than they have versions, and expecting runners to go out of their way to buy various consoles/game versions/etc to test everything is just not very realistic. In those cases you just do the best you can.

It is worth noting that verification doesn't necessarily need to catch everything on the first pass. Ideally as many issues as possible are caught upfront, and anything blatantly obvious really should be caught by the moderators, but once something's on the leaderboard the community is just as capable of noticing issues as the moderators are. The main purpose of verification isn't to catch cheaters, it's just the first line of defense against spam/people who don't know how to time their runs/obvious garbage/etc.

Huh I never thought about what the role of moderators really is. Very true that often there are more platforms than runners. I've checked other runs for cheating when I'm not a mod because I have the platform and they don't. And the moderator self-verified runs.

I think you're right that what is realistically achievable is preventing obvious cheating. Keeping some level of standards should prevent most attempts to begin with, such as submitting a superhuman TAS.

Submitting spam/obvious garbage, I like that such runs can be denied. I didn't know. Crazy to me seeing a 40 min run on a 7 minute game. Like practice the game for a few days versus submit the first and only attempt you ever made. And we can't submit a deliberately, excessively slow run and expect to troll the mods by wasting their time.