A lot of tools that are commonly depended on today will change on their own schedule. Nice ones will give you warning ahead of time that a change is coming, but you can't opt out of the change. APIs get deprecated. UIs get reorganized. There's not much you can do. With emacs there's an expectation that what worked for you 20 years ago will still work today. And in rare instances where that's not true, you can just not upgrade to a newer version of emacs.
Working in emacs definitely gives a feeling of control. If anything is ever going to replace emacs (or neovim, which I don't use but I understand is similar), it will have to give the same feelings of control, in addition to the same sense of focus that comes from an uncluttered UI.