Earlier quoted context omitted.
To that end I like spacemacs. But it did incur enough of a startup penalty that have have shifted back to vim. I oscillate between them and vscode. I don’t use vim bindings in vscode though.
Run it in daemon mode. startup time is not a thing for emacs.
Plus, I like to have separate instances of emacs with different groups of files from separate but related projects. I end up with a zoo of buffers commingled in daemon mode. It just doesn't fit how I work.
I wish it had an image based startup scheme... freeze an image of emacs after init is done.