That was me for 7 years (using vim instead of Emacs), and it was working fine with Python and Go. I used ctags for navigation, some shortcuts for pydoc, and that was essentially it.
Then I started working with Scala and, until metals (the language server for Scala) and LSP support was good enough (first vim, now I'm a happy nvim user), it was awful.
So I'm certain it depends on the language. My take before Scala clicked for me was that I didn't want to use a language that required an IDE (or IDE-alike features) to be productive. And I think that opinion was mostly because my bad experience with Java.
Then I started working with Scala and, until metals (the language server for Scala) and LSP support was good enough (first vim, now I'm a happy nvim user), it was awful.
So I'm certain it depends on the language. My take before Scala clicked for me was that I didn't want to use a language that required an IDE (or IDE-alike features) to be productive. And I think that opinion was mostly because my bad experience with Java.
I still write C without LSP, and I'm fine.