I don't think the fact that Vim and Emacs were created a long time ago makes them inferior.

They keep developing and they are up to date with many/all programming-features. There are bunch of extensions that VScode just doesn't have despite it's huge extension store.

Also the main thing for me about these editors and especially Emacs is that you can program it. Not just configure it but actually program and do anything with it. You can hook into any piece of the code and change it. You can read the source code of any "extension" and patch it on the fly. I don't think I'm aware of any other editors that allow that.

It's huge power.