IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don’t have your dots and thus choose not to customize the shell too much) and macOS is a huge bonus.

But I totally get that this is from outer space for another group. Vim is a great alternative for people who want a more opinionated editing wizard mode, and VSCode is really competent at interacting with remote filesystems and supporting lots of languages for the GUI crowd. It’s a great time to be editing text.