Admittedly, I was using Spacemacs which probably has way more packages than a bespoke emacs configuration, but you must understand if people get turned off when they ask you how to use an editor and your answer is "first, spend a few weeks setting it up and understand how each of your many packages works".
> How do emacs people deal with this
The same way anybody working with any package system does, by pinning ancient versions and/or just never updating all packages, at least for packages that aren't so widely used that they pretty much are never broken
2. git add .emacs.d/elpa
3. Don't click update all the time.
Stockholm syndrome.
Is it just about the installation format?
That's an outrageously false statement. If it were true, you'd rarely need plugins.
> I wonder what you'd consider an IDE nowadays.
The definition of an IDE hasn't changed in at least 20 years. INTEGRATED development environment.
If I install a C++ IDE, I have everything I need out of the box, and the experience is (usually) consistent across all features.
If I want to do C++ in Vim, I need to install about 10 plugins (to begin with) [1], which will result in a disjointed experience (each plugin has different authors with different visions) where things break randomly and I don't know why. Speaking from experience, unfortunately.
Yes, you can make it work and you can get used to it, but it's just a text editor that you try to coax into doing what you want by using plugins.
Whereas the IDE will give you a language-specific tool out of the box, without any significant effort or inconvenience on your part. And the overall experience is better because the IDE "just works" most of the time.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4237817/configuring-vim-...
oh, sorry, you asked for an IDE and not an operating system... /s
seriously, budget a day or two for the ergonomics and a week for wrangling plugins, but some of the most productive developers in the world use emacs and they never need to worry about vendor issues, porting issues, not having a GUI, support for some weird file type, ability to create some funky type of macro, etc.