I manage all my projects using a constellation of flexible (and hand-picked) tools it offers: magit for versioning, Org for documentation, note taking and time tracking, blacken, isort and prettier wrappers for my code formatting, ivy, counsel and dumb-jump for searching stuff and moving around, and I could go on and on. I understand that Emacs doesn't feel as "modern" as PyCharm or VS Code in a sense, but I don't think the "it's not an IDE" argument holds. It can be (if you want and take the time for it) a very powerful IDE, customized to exactly your needs. It can also be a lot of other things in addition. It's a difficult to classify tool, in a category of its own.