Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.
The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.)…
Unironically, maybe VS Code.
Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)
Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.