Not to say that you should use Emacs instead of VS Code or anything else. Just that Emacs not disappearing means that your investment to learn it and set it up is more likely to keep yielding returns.
If existence is tantamount to corporate sponsorship, then GNU Emacs never existed. It'd take one or two graybeards with too much free time to sustain Atom. Just look at the current Emacs maintainers.
What do you mean by this? The emacs-devel list looks like a smart and generally well run project.
Perhaps. Does Atom have said graybeards? The motivated ones are hard to come by.