I see no mention of the emacs daemon [1] which I've found very useful in resource constrained environments (ie. tiny VMs or underpowered chromebooks). That's especially true if you bring out the big guns like Spacemacs.
I feel that these complaints come mostly from people that have installed a ridiculous number of very inefficient plugins to make emacs look like something else. Spaceemacs in particular is big & slow (and IMO ugly on most devices).
With spacemacs it becomes particularly problematic (especially in regards to start up times), and I think that's where the emacs daemon truly shines.
(edit: also no complaints here; I just feel this daemon is great and wanted to share the sentiment; it also felt relevant as AFAIK vim has no such feature)