I love Emacs and have used it since the start of my programming career. It is so powerful and I consider it more like a portable programming environment than a text editor. But I find it's performance frustratingly slow. I accept that it will never be as fast as Vim, but when it takes as long or longer to boot up as a regular IDE it makes me question why I'm not using that. Plus there are large json files I can open up no problem in NeoVim that Emacs chokes on.

With that being said, there is no program that has come along that is a sufficient modern replacement for Emacs like Neovim is for Vim. Unless you've used Emacs heavily then it's just hard to understand. And it's not just being able to use a terminal or write some markdown/org notes in it.

It's built in support for IRC. Reading email. Emacs Speaks Statistics. It's being able to make functions and bind just about anything to a set of key chords. It's using things like restclient to send rest requests, and many other awesome things. Using Emacs kind of feels like programming in Smalltalk in a way.