emacs is a significantly larger installation (disk) than nano, taking longer to install and more system resources consumed. If I'm jumping into a small VPS to tweak something, or auto-installing an editor in every docker container, nano wins over emacs.

As a developer who almost exclusively uses GUI editors (Sublime / IntelliJ) I have lost the emacs skills I gained in college, and I don't use emacs enough to remember the key strokes necessary to make it more useful than nano. It's more difficult than nano because I have to google a cheat-sheet every time I use emacs.

I never liked vim.

Nano is a great terminal editor, has enough commands to make me productive when needed, and I use it exclusively for terminal text editing.