It is easy for people who love Emacs to believe that most people (or most programmers) would come to love (or prefer) Emacs if they would only put in the time to ascend the initial learning curve. But this belief is an instance of what is sometimes called the "typical-mind fallacy": an underestimation of how different people's minds are.

GNU Emacs was my daily driver from 1991 to late last year, when I switched to vscode. I wrote many lines of Emacs Lisp code -- 20,000 lines of which I "kept": I arranged for those lines to get loaded into Emacs every time Emacs starts, and since the code was almost all "UI" code, any particular function or piece of the code ran on average at least several times for every hour I spent using Emacs.

Although I do not regret choosing Emacs in 1991, vscode suits my particular mental make-up better than GNU Emacs did.

To take one example, I spent hours configuring Emacs to be less chatty. I turned off the bell that sounds every time the user makes an error (where for example asking Emacs to scroll down when the bottom of the document is already visible in the window is considered an "error" -- in contrast to vscode's not feeling the need to send a message to the user or get the user's attention when that happens). I tried (and mostly succeeded) in turning off the repetitive messages Emacs displays in the echo area, e.g., displaying "Wrote foo.c" any time Emacs writes to file foo.c and, e.g., (particularly distracting to my train of thought) the "Autosaving..." message that regularly appears in the Echo area X seconds after I stop typing. In contrast, vscode is silent (non-chatty) enough to suit me in its default configuration -- like most GUI apps since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 are.

P.S. The way I got rid of the "Autosaving..." message was to turn off Emacs's autosaving functionality altogether and add my own autosaving functionality, which consisted of a call to save-buffers every time the user switches buffers.