Stefan,
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