I left emacs around 2018 or 2019 after 8 years of use as my main. A couple weeks ago I started configuring neovim to use it as my main editor outside of work. I'm doing mostly what I did back when I started with emacs which was copy and pasting the code that the plugin creaters advised and go from there. My main takeaway is that Lua is an immensely better language than Lisp for this use case, and when something goes wrong I feel the same about the stack trace.

I've had a better experience tweaking the configuration in Lua as well. I never tried neovim's starter frameworks (NVChad, LunarVim, etc) so I can't compare them to emacs's. I was never able to use well emacs's frameworks because either they were too convoluted ann hard to customize or kept crashing.

Also when opening or formatting large files (sometimes not so large) emacs would freeze for a very long time. Also, LSP was not around, or was in its infancy, so my experience with code completion and intellisense was very poor, but perhaps that has changed.

Finally, emacs's plugin called "Magit" is a godsend and I lack a similar tool ever since.

With all that said emacs was very special for me because it fueled my passion for open software and being able to control and customize the tools I use. I really hope it got better and keeps kicking!