If you’re looking for nice area shapes, and don’t want to spend extra time baking for good emissive quality, I strongly recommend updating to 4.22 for rectangular lights and the new barn door feature. There’s nothing wrong with using emissives for baked lighting, it’s just that you need higher quality bake settings and portals, which can slow down the bake too.
Even with inverse square falloff, the circular/harsh falloff can be visible if your light is super bright. Adjusting the shape can help with the falloff, but regardless it’ll eventually get blown out. You have to find a balance with the intensity and exposure, which physical units can help with that if you’re familiar with those from offline renderers.