Emacs needs a package manager that is as easy to use as the one that comes with VS Code.

The plugins are the reason VS Code is popular. It's so, so easy to discover them and install them. You can download VS code and have a working dev environment with autocomplete and a debugger for almost any major programming language in 10 minutes.

When I started working in the tech industry, Textmate was pretty popular. It was supplanted by Sublime Text, which was supplanted by VS Code. Each time, the main factor in getting people to switch was the ease of finding and installing plugins.