The thing is: Emacs is so much more than editing. Just to give an example: I keep a list of meds for my retired parents in on org-table, and every few weeks I need to request a prescription from their doctor and order the meds from their pharmacist. I have a few lines of Elisp to select the meds that my parents need, generate a message for the pharmacist, generate a Fax document for the doctor, and a bunch of tasks (* TODO Send fax to Doctor, * TODO Waiting for prescription from Doctor, * TODO Send prescription to pharmacist, * TODO Waiting for meds from pharmacist, etc) in my org-agenda task list. Triggered with one key combo. By being able to start python or shell scripts from within Lisp code, I am able to automate everything that I run on my Mac, and pass data from one workflow to another.
This wasn't easy in any editor I used. And none of these editors were meant to be used like that, because their main purpose was / is to edit files, not control Spotify with it, write emails, read rss feeds, and whatnot.
Yes, VS Code goes in that direction, but I don't know many laymans who extend VS Code. They are rather devs with a focus on JS.
After all, my workflow is to precious to put in any non-free ecosystem ;)
Until I started using Emacs seriously. Now I use Emacs for opening URLs, for triggering Google searches (and saving my searches via org-capture), for saving URLs via org-protocol and org-capture, for taking notes, for journaling, for task management (previously OmniFocus, then Things3), and for all kinds of workflows. It is the ideal application framework, with one of the most versatile programming languages I can think of (Lisp); it made me stop using Python for my day-to-day scripting (love Python!).
Emacs (and Lisp) is a tool for the next decades of my life.