Citation needed.
I’m an admin for the largest email community online (emailgeeks) and when folks talk about code, everyone is talking about writing this stuff by hand.
There are modern alternatives to manual coding both for developers (embeddable editors for SAAS) such as beefree, unlayer, chamaileon, stripo and for email designers like beefree, stensul, knak, stripo, taxiforemail...
Once that’s done it does drastically improve the speed of email creation though.
In my experience the more shiny the email is, the more logos and whatever components are around the actual content the less clicks I get. So i try to be just a branded level above a text email.
This sounds like a pretty amazing art form if people are building cross-client compatible, rich, modern email designs with tables and inline styling.