In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul.
But, that overhaul is hard to impossible to do without losing compatibility. And that compatibility is why you simply cannot replace emacs or LaTeX: There is many decades of features, packages, and whole ecosystems in there. Throwing that away would be a giant loss, people will always continue using it. Other editors can't catch up. Maybe if they survive for ~50 years, too?
Just to drive home how old emacs is: At one point, the popular joke was that emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". Yep, 8MB large software was so bloated that it was funny and debilitating.
My first Linux PC had 8MB RAM, long long after emacs became a thing. If emacs' resident set came even close to half of that or so, "constantly swapping" would have been reality.