What's the most exciting features recently added to Emacs (or coming soon)? I don't use emacs at all, so any feature you're excited for is fair game, even if it's not exactly recent.
Seriously, go through the fine tutorial and just start exploring it. No matter what you put off for doing that, it will be worth it.
In my experience, this has a huge positive impact on performance, and can make Emacs feel a lot faster, smoother, and more responsive. Others say it doesn’t yield a noticeable difference for them, but on both of my machines it’s quite noticeable.
LSP support (Language Server Protocol). Basically any language / file format for which a LSP backend has been written can now be used from Emacs.
LSP is not as powerful yet as, say, IntelliJ IDEA for Java development but suddenly the line between "text editor" and "IDE" for Emacs got much, much, much more blurry.
SLIME already did this to Emacs like twenty years ago.