I wish there was a solid competitor to Emacs, but the thing that keeps me coming back is that I have the time to tinker with it a lot and the community is great. Vim and Vscode have some valiant maintainers of projects, but from what I've seen it's nothing compared to the big Emacs projects, especially Org mode for which I haven't found a reasonable alternative in Vscode.

However, I don't like fact that most of the editor is a single event loop. This is not a big deal most of the time, but if, say, you're using magit on a large repo and a command finishes and the buffer must refresh, you're gonna wait there for several seconds being unable to do anything else (no switching to other buffers, much less continuing to use Magit while it is updated asynchronously). (btw if I'm wrong about this, for the long of god enlighten me!)

elisp is a bit quirky and dated, and very hard to figure out incrementally. I am still at the place of "copy-paste from other smart people's configs" because I have not really sunk the time to gain a deep understanding of the language; the lack of types and a somewhat tricky (although functional) debugger prevents many of the things about the language from being elucidated, especially because the powerful macros.

However, I don't really know what an effective alternative would be besides perhaps Javascript (which I'm also not a fan of) or Python.