Emacs requires fiddling. Once you get past a certain age, you no longer want to fiddle with your tools; they should just work. A tool that just works may well be therefore orders of magnitude better than Emacs.
I think that downplays how much fiddling other tools take. I've never used another similarly powerful editor that didn't require similar amounts of configuration to be useful. And if getting some random plugin working means you have to tweak its code, it's almost certainly going to be fast and easier in Emacs than in the other. With Emacs, you can generally just replace a function after its been loaded. In other things, you may be forking a repo, editing/compiling it, and figuring out how to get the editor to load your version of it.
> In other things, you may be forking a repo, editing/compiling it, and figuring out how to get the editor to load your version of it.
This is more a theoretical problem in VSCode. If you just want to start programming using a mainstream language or framework, in VSCode it's literally a matter of saying 'code .', downloading whatever extensions it recommends for the language it autodetected, and starting work with autocomplete, debugging support, and all that ready to go.
Read @bborud's comments in this thread. He had been using Emacs for even longer than I, and he switched to VSCode and is not looking back. Because Emacs requires fiddling to keep running and VSCode does not. And that makes VSCode better.
The experience with distributions like Spacemacs, doom emacs or lazynvim really isn't that much worse than vscode, you select the language you want to code, it installs a reasonable set of plugins and you get to work.
