Sometimes I think people trick themselves into thinking that all their fiddling with Emacs counts as part of their productivity.

Don't hate on me. I use Emacs just about every day. I used to use Emacs as my go to editor for writing code ... and it almost worked. But it was never hassle free, and things often worked more poorly than I would have liked, or ended up requiring too much fiddling to get it to work right, or packages were inadequately maintained. So now, I tend to use it for quick, short code writes, especially when I'm remoted in to a server. I also use it for org-mode, and for writing my book.

Now I use Pycharm for python and web development for things that can reasonably be called a "project"; the level of language support, introspection, and intelligent code prediction exceeds anything I ever achieved in Emacs.

I use VSCode for quick scripts, and for when I need to do maintenance work on some old php code. I like it fine. It fits in this really nice place between a full IDE and a bare bones text editor like Notepad or even BBEdit (ha!).