Emacs requires fiddling. Once you get past a certain age, you no longer want to fiddle with your tools; they should just work. A tool that just works may well be therefore orders of magnitude better than Emacs.
This is more a theoretical problem in VSCode. If you just want to start programming using a mainstream language or framework, in VSCode it's literally a matter of saying 'code .', downloading whatever extensions it recommends for the language it autodetected, and starting work with autocomplete, debugging support, and all that ready to go.
Read @bborud's comments in this thread. He had been using Emacs for even longer than I, and he switched to VSCode and is not looking back. Because Emacs requires fiddling to keep running and VSCode does not. And that makes VSCode better.