I used Emacs from 2010-2012 just to know what I was missing. I liked using it and tinkering with it, but when it came to being productive, all of the tooling felt out of date and hard to use in comparison to Vim.

I said then that if someone would make a text editor and IDE that used JavaScript from the ground up instead of elisp, that it would dominate, and that's what seems to have happened with VS Code.

I respect your settlement on VS Code. What works, works. But 2010-2012 was seemingly ages ago compared to how well the Emacs ecosystem has modernized in such a short, recent timespan. You may find it appealing again, if you're ever interested. With the work done on speeding it up via native compilation, I don't think I'll ever find a better editor for myself, personally.