The strength of emacs is that once you can program it it's extremely easy to write extensions for it, even for one off tasks, because it's so quick and easy.

Compared to this in vscode writing extensions is much more convoluted. You wouldn't create a new vscode extension for a 1 hour task, for example, while with emacs it's trivial to write some small code which can help you with your current task. I often do.