Very few Emacs users need a "perfectly good text editor". This is not why anyone uses Emacs.

For me, personally, Emacs is a terminal emulator, interface to Git, MUA, file manager, organizer and planner, a gateway for configuring various aspects of the system I'm using... I even use it to run alsamixer, because it's easier for me to control sound volume this way.

Oh, and an interface to govmomi / aws-cli / az with a bunch of custom code written around those tools. Openstack pending.

And any Emacs user you ask will have a bunch of other uses... Some other things I've done / or played around in the past include: Wiki server, cooperative editing (with Rudel, probably dysfunctional by now), binary files editing (well, I still do every now and then), Web browsing, IRC (and Jabber way, way back)...