Watching the Emacs community, I’m always just blown away by the love and adoration it gets. It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself. I’ve tried - really tried, including relearning lisp - to adopt Emacs roughly four times over my career; it never stuck. I understand the basic benefits, eg keyboard-optimized workflows, deep customization/malleability, etc. B…
However, Emacs distributions like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs are definitely more approachable and featured OOTB than vanilla Emacs.
For me, the benefit of Emacs is that it's a single environment I can do everything in. I also am the type to enjoy messing with my workflow.
IMO most of that can be replicated with VS Code in a much more user friendly manner (VS Code remote editing blows TRAMP out of the water), with the caveat that multiple projects means multiple windows, it's difficult to have an entirely mouseless workflow, and in general it's less customizable than Emacs.
I personally never bothered to learn Emacs keybindings and instead use Vim keybindings in every editor I touch; VS Code and Emacs both have excellent Vim plugins.
Honorable mention: Neovim. It is lighter weight than either Emacs or VS Code but can still have pretty much all the bells and whistles. Definitely cool if you prefer to live in a terminal.