I have never given emacs a fair shot, so I can't compare the two. Neovim makes it easier to get modern editor features like treesitter and lsp support integrated into the editor. The Lua api seems to have been very well received, so the plugin ecosystem for neovim is thriving. It has also attracted a lot of people outside of the original vim niche (including me!) recently, which means there are more plugin developers who care about how things look and feel to use.

There are certainly some constrains on what plugins can achieve due to nvim being exclusively a TUI, but in my opinion the pros of the editor outweigh the cons.

As to what makes me choose neovim over vscode with a vim plugin, it's a combination of things. One thing I love is that neovim is extremely easy to configure. I also enjoy that everything follows vim rules, rather than some things like file trees or consoles having their own unique rules. I have also become dependent on some vim plugins that don't exist in vscode.