Note that I'm referring to Visual Studio, not VS Code.

In my last job, we didn't use any plugins with Visual Studio for a bunch of years before one developer convinced the rest to use Resharper.

> Almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes which would definitely be helped by task-specific enhancements (plugins which are typically much easier to get in other editors/IDEs)

I find this statement untethered from reality. I think this gets to the crux of much of this discussion. There seems to be an implicit assumption that Emacs exist for writing code (hence the comparisons with VS Code, etc).

I think if you poll most Emacs users, while programming will definitely have more weight, a lot of people use Emacs for all kinds of things unrelated to programming: TODO management, document authoring, writing emails, etc. Most of my Emacs usage in my first job was simply editing text files, not programming. This is in line with most non-SW engineering jobs: They need text editors, but not plugins. Over 95% of my home usage is non-programming related.

So when you imply almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes where they will want to look for plugins, that's simply far from the truth. Until recently, most people who used text editors used Notepad (the default Windows one), and I've never managed to convince a Notepad user to use anything more powerful. Nice plugins would not sway them.

While Emacs is heavily used by some programmers, I do not think it is the aim of Emacs. It is a general purpose text editor, and a platform for writing text oriented apps.