You cannot grok it without first trying to live inside it.

It can be treated as an editor, and as your workflow slowly adjusts you will find yourself writing a mental wishlist.

Realising that wishlist is where Emacs shines among other editors/IDEs/applications.

It is a headspace/workspace and imo the programming equivalent of BASB.

I for example use it because I want nothing to pull me from my workflow, so I have shells, repls, notebooks, filesystem browser, internet browser, rss, and a slew of other utilities tiled, something akin to a Bloomberg terminal, even spotify if I need music. It has enabled my productivity in a way no other application could.