Without knowing the “higher” reality, I’d still call it a simulation. An emulator is capable of replacing the “real” system it’s emulating. Maybe that’s your view on the topic, but I find it more likely the higher reality is more complex than ours because it contains ours. Therefore our reality could not be an emulation. Lots of speculation though.
My own intricate system of 4 git repos to manage dotfiles, bash initialization, cli tools/scripts, and system state.
The last one keeps track of installed packages and “dotfiles” out of the home directory (system config files like /etc/hosts).