You'd usually have a DWIM command, e.g. that it formats the region, but default to the paragraph if nothing else is selected. I have the feeling you are making this out to be a bigger difference than it actually is.
What I think is the mistake is that vim/kak are all just interfaces, while Emacs is software. Emacs can steal anything that any other program does, and have it combined with it's existing strengths, like the ball of mud that it is. And even without emulation modes, there is inherently nothing in Emacs that is stopping it from using the same kind of sentence mentality you are talking about (and that I am familiar with, I have used both, but prefer Emacs).
> In Emacs, you'd need a separate plugin for each of these, wouldn't you?
Plugin is the wrong word, you mean package, but not necessarily. Emacs has syntactic commands, that can operate on a major-mode specific definition of expressions, sentences, top-level definitions (defuns).
To do what you did in your example, I'd just use macros, recording this sequence:
C-a M-SPC C-s | (repeat C-s to select the column you want) C-w (again move cursors where you want to paste things) M-w
and then repeat that for all the following lines. Multiple cursors are just visualized macros, after all.