Does it have to be interesting to share? Writing a gameboy emulator is a fun and challenging project in and of itself, and something that not everyone can do. That alone I think is impressive enough to share.
I agree with you in general, but I think it's worth pointing out that programming the NES's PPU is actually very similar to programming with a 2D graphics library today.
NES games never wrote their own scrolling logic, or there own graphics logic. They wrote tile values into a background table and then told the NES how much to scroll the playing field, and the NES rendered and scrolled everything automagically.
NES games never drew their own sprites. They just said "Hey NES, write the sprite at this x and y location" and the NES did it.
Audio worked the same way.
Honestly, coding for the NES would be similar to working with a simple 2D graphics library. So I don't know if it would be accurate to say "every line of code is yours" on the NES. It's more just that the "libraries" used were implemented in hardware instead of software.
While Salt Lake technically meets the requirements, they do so just barely. The metro area barely cracks a million people, and the airport maybe has 1 or 2 international flights a day. Plus Amazon and the Utah state government still have a lot animosity towards each other from the whole online tax thing.
Plus it's really tough to attract out of state talent in Utah.
I think Salt Lake would be a very hard sell compared to what Amazon could easily get with Denver.
There're a lot of them out there