Is it allowed, when emulating, to Save State near the end of the opening cutscene for faster run resets? Say for instance, if Blizzard doesn't drop from that barrel in the Tutorial Save Room? Or does a full Hard Reset need to be done for RNG reasons?

I would prefer if a full reset was done in the interest of fairness and for RNG reasons. When the game file is selected appears to affect the action RNG, and that's one reason why blizzard is hard to manipulate on console.