In my case, it was using Linux distros pre-vscode that got me into emacs. In that era, your choices for general-purpose developer-oriented file editor were (a) emacs, (b) vim, (c) something that was ported from another OS and either running in an emulator or running atop a library stack that barely worked on your architecture and would take like thirty seconds to boot up.
vscode didn't exist when I learned vim, and Visual Studio was only on Windows, and I had seen demonstrated that people using vim seemed to be a lot faster manipulating and navigating code.