It made Emacs users like me notice, mainly by previously-working functionality in Emacs breaking.  Looking at the old bug report, the $EMACS setting was determined to be obsolete because a few Bash users incorrectly used the $EMACS variable in their scripts.

According to the Bash documentation, Bash considers the $EMACS variable to be special and alters its behavior based on the contents.  I would argue this indicates that it's the script writers in error and no action should've been taken besides a kind pointer to refer to the Bash manual to the script writers.

Regards,

Jake