I usually save scum for old games, because I simply don't have months or years on hand to spend on a single game like I did in my childhood. I do however tend to use save points mostly at occasions when the game legit allows you to save also, because especially with emulation it's easier and faster to load a savepoint than to use the ingame save/load feature. Like, I am playing through Ocarina of Time on the Switch right now, and when i stop playing, I will put a savepoint there so I can continue right from where I left off. There's no need for me to load the game save file ingame just to be dropped back to Kokiri forest and walk all the way back to Death Mountain just to continue with my adventure from there, is there?
On the other hand, when I finished Star Fox Adventures on Gamecube, I beat like the last third of the game in a long session of 4-5 hours without saving once. I simply forgot about it. And since the game does not autosave, not even after the credits roll, when I loaded up my gamefile again, I was like all the way back and it sucked. At least I had recorded that session with a capture card... but left that recording on an external HDD for 5+ years, after which the data had been corrupted and could not be restored ever again. So, there's no tangible evidence that I ever finished the game.
But I did.