That’s a long story actually. Analogue has a (poorly implemented, in my opinion) marketing campaign advertising that their FPGA consoles don’t use normal software emulators like say SNES9x. Their devices instead emulate the consoles on a special chip called an FPGA that lets you mimic the circuits that make up the CPU and other parts. It’s still emulation, just a very different kind than what you normally get on devices like this. That’s also why it’s so hard to release new cores for the Pocket, because you have to create this mimic circuit design that often doesn’t exist elsewhere.
Analogue also doesn’t advertise the ROM playing nature, but their official cores are just a download away in a dedicated area they put aside for community contributions.
Analogue consoles still are emulating the old game consoles, but they do so in a different way than a normal software emulator. This emulates the individual circuits of the device on a special chip called a FPGA. This has the advantage of supporting much lower input latency (say with real controllers) and video latency (down to the cycle for CRTs). This means your lightgun will work on a FPGA NES with connected CRT, along with making the system “feel” better (due to the lower latency).