At the point where you find yourself dinking with Emacs and making excuses to yak shave instead of getting your work done -- which, given that it's Emacs and makes most other tools seem positively stone-knives-and-bearskins by comparison, is in practice a quite tempting trap to fall into.
The best way to approach things is incrementally. Find some pain point in your current workflow and write a little bit of Elisp to automate the painful bits. Let's say you're running manual UI tests and then eyeball-grepping the logs in your backend. "But nobody does that!" you say. "Why would anybody do that?" Heh. You'd be surprised. Anyhoo, thr crank has to be turned on a prod deploy by COB Friday and you've got no time to investigate Nightwatch or the other UI-testing libraries out there, let alone integrate them with a log watcher.
Thankfully you're an Emacs user! So you write a little Elisp to start the back end, capture its output in a buffer, and count the number of occurrences of the log cookie that represents a successful (or failed) row insert, etc. You haven't automated your whole process, but you've automated part of it, and that's saved you considerable pain. And it took maybe half a page of Lisp, if that.
Recently I was confronted with an ancient web service whose only integration test process was "manually hit the endpoints with Postman, then check to make sure the records hit the database". So I wrote Emacs Lisp code to send the requests, run the queries, and even manage the Docker container where the service lived. This let me run the whole process much faster with a few M-x commands. It was nothing fancy, either, I just wrote code to spin up curl, Docker, and SQL*Plus and capture and examine their output, sort of using Emacs as a powerful full-screen shell. Rather than get in my way, it became a versatile tool I could apply to the task to get things done much faster.
Again, this is the difference between an extensible editor and a completely malleable one. VSCode, JetBrains, or Eclipse cannot be extended as incrementally and on-the-fly as Emacs.