Seems like it would depend on the emergency. I have no doubt that often binoculars would be useless. But I can imagine a scenario where the plane's glide path exceeds daytime visual range of the naked eye, and binoculars would help one pilot to more quickly identify the best distant emergency landing site (e.g., a road, a meadow, any relatively flat place with the fewest obstructions) while the other one actually flies the plane.
If you know you're going down and still have useful control surfaces, picking the best available emergency landing site is job #1, no?
OTOH, I agree with you that if the plane is so crippled or so low that it can't fly beyond daytime visual range of the naked eye, the binoculars are just excess weight.