> There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though, Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience
This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark.
For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good. When I introduced it to a coworker, he didn't want to switch to it because of the low contrast. After a week of using it, he can't imagine going back to high contrast.
As for the rest, while I do agree with some points, I will say: If you make Emacs more like VS Code, then people will have even fewer reasons to use Emacs.