> we're here to edit text though, I thought?
It seems you're missing the point - that example is 'reductio ad absurdum' - a showcase of the logical extreme of capabilities, not an illustration of concrete practicality.
You seem to be blinded by your sunk cost, social proof, tribal identity, status quo, and other biases, so you rather reject novel ideas than accept their practical superiority in certain scenarios.
Emacs, in every respect, is a pinnacle of text editing in its digital form. Half a century of evolution and refinement with fundamental architectural advantage - a Lisp runtime that happens to edit text.
It makes it possible to edit any text that lives within its running instance and beyond - just about anything it can reach - containers, kubernetes pods, browsers. I can edit the URL of any tab in my browser directly from my editor; remote computers - I can edit a commit message on an EC2 instance; heck, even spacecrafts a million miles away - if it can gain access. More than that - there's universal bidirectionality - I can push any text into Emacs - from my terminal, my browser, or any app. If I allow access to it, I can even push to Emacs from remote computers.
I'm, by the way, not an 'Emacs purist' - I use Neovim daily, and sometimes VSCode too. I have used various JetBrains products - I was a heavy user of IntelliJ for almost a decade. Yet, getting exposure to Emacs capabilities proved that I was wrong in my prejudice and I should've tried it sooner. Like I said: it's a mindset-changing endeavor - without a heartfelt attempt to use it, it's unlikely you'll ever get what I'm even talking about.