I think it hugely depends on the programming languages one uses (or used to use), as well as personal history. For example basically everyone learning lisp was, for a long time, encouraged to use emacs (I think this is still the case for Common Lisp but I’m not sure about other varieties). This makes for a pretty unpleasant lisp learning curve as most people are not already familiar with emacs. Other functional languages in the ML family may not be very similar to lisp in many important ways but because their lineage went back to lisp people and environments, emacs ended up usually being the editor with the best support, though this is less the case these days.

If one looks at computer history there seem to be several versions of a cycle that looks like “crap underpowered computer slowly gets more features and better performance only to become outnumbered by a smaller slower cheaper computer.” Depending on where one fell in that cycle, emacs may not have been an option (eg if you were starting programming on dos or an early windows you likely wouldn’t be using emacs. If you were starting at the same time using a Unix workstation, emacs might be a reasonable or recommended choice).

During the early naughties you were probably using windows and not exposed to emacs unless you worked on Unix/Linux based web backends.