I do agree, ultimately it comes down to a few factors: inclination and time being chief among them. Does tinkering in Emacs actually save me time or is it something I am doing because I like doing it. There is a non-trivial cost to living in the Emacs ecosystem.

That’s why I caveated things. I have used Emacs a long, long time and I still do, but I have simplified my setup and backed off of it for many editing chores.

I don’t think the utility is there for someone to spend the man hours customizing an editing environment for say Python dev when something like Pycharm exists, for example. Even vscode with a few extensions is very powerful and reaching IDE levels of capability.

Emacs and living in its lisp machine is amazing and Zen and something I leveraged when I enjoyed the whole process. These days I simply don’t have time :)