Mobile Device Testing - Emulation over Real Devices

I work as a Test Manager but also involved in building out and supporting test automation frameworks / build pipelines.

I have a query around mobile device testing, specifically testing of your responsive website.

Where i work we do quite a significant amount of exploratory testing of our responsive site on actual devices (Android and iOS), i think this is predominately born of the fact that emulation has historically been seen as inconsistent and it's difficult to articulate the risk of not doing this testing on actual devices.

Over the last few years things have moved on.. I'm trying to get a feel for it, whether we move 90% of our exploratory testing to using Chrome device emulation and then very simple and quick look & feel testing on a device.

Anyone have any thoughts or experience in this? Tried to do the same and still saw significant issues in doing so and therefore moved back purely to device testing?

I know there are services like Appium and SauseLabs but thats not an option for us.

Cheers