When we hadn't even standardized the keyboard layout and the "display" was a dot matrix printer? When there was no networking to speak of?
How does that make more sense?
I can throw the bullshit rhetoric right back at you: You think absolutely nothing was better in the 60s? That modern IDEs lost nothing compared to the tools of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? Why isn't Emacs like Borland? Why isn't Emacs like Visual Studio? Why isn't Emacs like Eclipse? Why isn't it like Mosaic, QuickBasic, Coldfusion? There are reasonable answers to these questions, and they'll tell you also why Emacs isn't like whatever you want to compare it to today.
Maybe Emacs already occupies a local maximum, "a middle ground", taking some of the best compatible ideas from the times it's been alive in. Vi another local maximum. IntelliJ or VSCode, others - but emphasis then on local, and I hope you like retraining.
The problem is not keybindings or what decade its metaphors exist in, it's people see Magit or Org or whatever high-level fully-integrated tool, and want just that. And you don't understand that is an outcome of a path that really does require the whole philosophy to ingest into your workflow. But you don't want to learn the philosophy, you just want to 10x crush git or whatever. No, it won't happen. There's all sorts of dumbass metaphors in in this thread now, but in the end Emacs is garden, not a hammer or a workbench or an oscilloscope or whatever. You get out proportion to what you put in, you work with it not just use it.
Shit's just gonna get faster. You need to find ways to live with it, not copy it. Talk to your fathers-in-law.
At a certain critical mass, soft-ware stops being soft. Other things bend to accommodate the soft-ware.
You know what's even harder than hard soft-ware? Social mores and expectations. For example, such as those formed by millions upon millions of spreadsheet users.
Or billions and billions of web users.
So, where am I going with this? Emacs has encoded some norms from the 60s when the tech community was probably 0.1% of what it is now, and when large numbers of those 0.1% people were technically adept and very flexible in adopting new things.
"Web arcana" has been assimilated by a million more applications and systems than those systems that inspired Emacs had. It has also been assimilated by billions (!) of people.
60s arcana is not equivalent to web arcana, for this reason.