I'm not actually sure Vim has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs at this point. I've made recent attempts to make good friends with both Vim and Emacs, and have experience with Emacs 27 and Vim 8. In my hopefully not too cynical observation, Vim fans tend to overestimate Emacs's complexity and capacity to be confusing (even saying this as someone who has admitted to being confused by Emacs!), while Emacs fans tend to underestimate modern Vim's capability.

I am not sure whether I just have bad luck with Emacs extensions. :) I suspect it depends on what languages you're delving into; I found trying to get HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript modes all playing nicely together (literally, since the same file could technically have all four, with a secondary template language thrown in for good measure!) challenging. But that particular adventure was a while ago. (My most recent attempt was with Spacemacs, which, uh, I'll just say it has some great color schemes.)

Re: Emacs Lisp: well, I did say "often feels like," not "actually is." :) I'm sure you're right; it's just that sense that a lot of early problems get solved by "to do the thing you want to do, paste this code into your init file," and getting past the feeling that you're assembling a configuration you don't reallllllly understand -- and thus may not be able to debug if something goes wrong -- can be a hurdle.