This person really just needs to lean into Emacs harder. The real strength of Emacs comes when you use it for everything, and so have a perfectly consistent, extensible, and discoverable user environment.
"Do everything in Emacs" is an exceedingly short hop from "Maybe just write your own operating system."
It's possible to do "very extensible" and "easy to onboard" -- Obsidian.md is the "actually usable Org-mode" I've been looking for, YMMV.
One of my annoyances with VSCode, which I do think will one day eat the world, is that it still seems the basic level of abstraction is too high. So there's a separate terminal window, which I always have to tell to go away, and which has its own key bindings. What I want is just a text buffer running my shell, that behaves like every other text buffer. Same with the database clients available for VSCode - stop building UIs, just give me text with a process running in the background. The editor is already all the UI I need.
hehe, +1
leaning into it harder means understanding it better, the internals, why it works and why it does things the way it does.
Now only if our phones were lisp machines.