I doubt that there is any ongoing vim vs. emacs flamewar. Most people are probably arguing about VSCode vs. JetBrains these days. My impression as an Emacs user is that if someone says they use Vim, I think "hey, one of us". (nano I guess falls into that category, but I bet nano users are missing out on some timesaving innovations from the last few years, and nothing frustrates me more than people that have inefficient workflows because they eschew learning new things.)
> Emacs Lisp is not really a particularly fun language to use simply for customizing the behavior of an editor — as they say, Emacs is a nice operating system, it just needs a good editor.
I doubt one would like an OS where the SDK only supports a language they don't like. I know this was an attempt to reuse a quote, but I think they actually like the editor and dislike the OS, which is the opposite of what sentiment that quote conveys. (Here's another tired meme: "eighty megs and constantly swapping".)
Emacs Lisp is actually very interesting in its staying power. It was designed from the ground up to write programs that the programmer is in front of all day, and that's very different than the enterprise / systems programming use cases that modern languages optimize for (where tens of thousands of copies of your program need to run unattended). The API and tooling matter more than the actual programming language, and I've looked around at other editor platforms and they're just not there yet. You can't C-M-x to run the line of code you're currently editing. You have to write HTML and CSS to supply preferences to your plugin. It's so weird to me how actively extension-hostile the popular editors are these days, and how hard they make manipulating the contents of the editor.