200h is a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to turn keystrokes into source code of your current project. I don't think it's a lot if you think of Emacs as a tool to help realize the ideas of your lifetime.
Summarizing: everything you do takes time and this time has an associated opportunity cost.
If you can configure another tool in 2-5-10 hours to achieve 90% of the efficiency Emacs gives you and you can use the other 190-195-198 hours to actually realize those "ideas of your lifetime", it is a lot of time spent (and maybe wasted). Also: https://xkcd.com/1205/ + tinkering isn't necessarily productivity. If anything, it's more often procrastination.
Finally, I'm not sure how you could prove that Emacs it the only thing that allows you to achieve those "ideas of your lifetime", I don't think that's even a falsifiable statement, it's just your personal opinion.
These are what the author mentioned. From my own usage, I can easily make the list 3x longer. Emacs is an application platform for Elisp apps. Your statement is the equivalent of saying "Just spend 10 hours learning VBA and you'll get 90% of the benefits you got from years of practicing C."
You take that linked xkcd far too seriously. Life is not about
maximising productivity.
We can also save time by not caring about the color of our
clothes, getting cheap fast food instead of preparing our own
meals and so on, yet in the end most people don't do that
because the difference is more than hours of their life.
I got better ergonomics, fewer distractions and higher comfort
out of my customisation. Yes, I sunk many hours to get to that
point. But on the way I learned many fascinating concepts, bash
scripting, a deeper understanding of software and computers and
more. Without this kind of tinkering I wouldn't even have
started programming in the first place.
