I don't think the Emacs situation is bad at all, but I agree 100% that it needs third party plug-ins to be anything close to what people expect of an editor in 2022.
>Contrast this with Emacs and Vim. They just don’t have proper completion as an editor’s extension point. Rather, they expose low-level cursor and screen manipulation API, and then people implement competing completion frameworks on top of that!
People don't implement competing completion frameworks on top of "low-level cursor and screen manipulation API". There are more high-level APIs included in Emacs, such as completion-at-point. To quote company-mode's website:
>The CAPF back-end provides a bridge to the standard completion-at-point-functions facility, and thus works with any major mode that defines a proper completion function.
To me the author misrepresents what Emacs has built-in and what package writers use.
Technically company-mode isn't third party, it's part of GNU Emacs. It needs to be downloaded, yes, but it's not third party. Emacs needs a package recommendation engine (I know VS Code has this, awesome!).
What you get with ivy/company/etc is different ways on how to expand/handle/show completions and they're all still relevant.
I'm using different frontends depending on the mode that I'm using. I personally dislike pop-up style completions. I'm using a mixture of completion buffers (the boring emacs built-in ones) ivy and ido instead.
Why is that? Emacs comes built in with modes like `fido-vertical-mode`, which are arguably more powerful and modern than `company-mode`. They're just not turned on by default.