I've been using Emacs for an entire 1 year and I have to say - I only like OrgMode. I've barely tried out Magit, so maybe that's another killer feature. But for programming, I think that Emacs is too steep a hill to climb when VSCode and JetBrains' IDEs offer so much out of the box or just a few clicks/commands away. In Emacs, you can can, in theory, do anything you like. And it is so impressive when you customize it to behave in a certain way. It's also more open for tweaking than any other editor. 'describe-function' and 'describe-key' are super cool, for example. But VSCode is just more practical. Instead of writing some Elisp (which is an incredibly awkward language) to customize your IDE, you can just go to the extensions screen and very likely find and download an extension that does what you want. Maybe not exactly. Maybe you could make Emacs behave much more precisely, according to your preferences. But you might spend hours, if not days, depending on your level of expertise. Meanwhile, with VSCode, you essentially bypass all that.
You are totally right. Being an emacs user for 10 years, I suggest vscode when people ask what editor to choose.
While preconfigured Spacemacs, Doom and others are doing a good job in turning emacs into OOB editor, they still require some tinkering with lisp, while in vscode you just install plugins and you are done.
Have you tried preconfigured Emacs distributions, like Doom or Spacemacs? You just open your init.el file and uncomment packages you want to enable with pretty good defaults. They have package managers preinstalled too, like straight.el. Also, every package has easy to paste initialization snippet
