Did we forget how Emacs used to mean "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping?"

Saying that as an Emacs User for almost 20 years now. Even today there are things that can bring Emacs crawling to its knees. The moment you start adding auto-complete to a big project, or if you have your files hosted in some NFS server, you're SOL.

The autocomplete is somewhat easy to fix in principal. Just offload to a daemon for the autocompletes, for example.

No, I haven't bothered with it. :( I did setup GLOBAL, which is quite nice. Though, many languages nowdays would benefit greatly from a presentation compiler. Which seems silly, at the extreme. It isn't like projects have gotten more complicated in scope. They have ballooned in implementation complexity, though. :(

But vim/emacs are ancient, and even Blender is from the nineties. I would say the situation is pretty bleak if we need to rely forever on these ancient beasts because we can't make good software anymore.

Ancient,yes. Still actively developed and maintained. Maybe if contributing into projects was more of a thing, then trying to reinvent, we had better sofware.

Yes, exceptions are exceptional.