I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange.
It's not 100% perfect, but close enough. I'm quite enjoying using VSCode now. It's fantastic having a wealth of actually user-friendly features/extensions to choose from.
VSCode is so annoyingly cluttered/blinking/animating/popup-infested by default though. There are a lot of things to disable in the default config.
The incremental search behavior still trips me up; it sorta works but not exactly.
Then there are a few crucial key bindings missing (like creating and closing split windows) - that seems doable without changing the core VSCode behavior.
I'm in the same boat - I've used it almost daily for 7ish years at this point. It's so much fun to use and customize, but there are easier options out there.
When people find out I use Emacs I always caution them against using it. It's taken me a long, long time to be productive in Emacs. VSCode, JetBrains tools, etc. don't have the same requirement and start up time to productivity.
Buying into Emacs does give you a lot though! Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files, always feel better than other applications for me.
It does. And the editor design, where almost everything of significance is just a function you can call/advise etc. from user code, makes it the most supple editor on earth. That's why I'm still there. But...
Professionally? -- Couple hundreds... well, probably more than average programmer: I worked in HP as Ops, and a big chunk of my job was to help Java programmers to cope with their programming environment. I.e. we (the ops) supplied them with Maven build, and they didn't know and didn't learn how to use it, so every day I had to go cubicle to cubicle fixing the same problems for these people.
You learn to despise people like these for not being able to perform basic stuff on their computers... stuff like look for a file with a particular text in it or opening a file with an extension not recognized by their editor of choice.
So... the campus I was on at that job had three buildings. Two had five floors and another one had I think a dining room on the ground floor and like two more floors, but mostly non-programmers there. A floor had like... four cubicles on the short side and maybe a dozen on the long side. Some cubicles had two occupants, but obviously I didn't visit every one there... Still, just in HP I must've met more than a hundred. I worked all in all in 13 companies over my career. Two of these way too small (<5 people) to count, beside HP, I also worked in Google (through acquisition) and I work in a company of a similar size today (also, through acquisition). Two more companies were 100+ employees (of course, I didn't meet everyone), and the rest are under 100. That's over something close to 25 years.
I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.