This is correct. After trying out Smalltalk, I realised that Emacs has very much the same design: a minimal interpreted language which is used to implement a large program, where you can inspect and modify the program at any time. The major difference is that Emacs isn’t image-based.

I wasn't commenting on Emacs vs Vim. My comment was regarding the meme-like nature of Emacs often being suggested for almost anything, almost "the Simpsons did it"-esque. My experience with Emacs is that it is a giant kluge, whereas Smalltalk and its kind are much more streamlined and simple. And Emacs is an editor driven and configured by a language. Smalltalk is a language that comes with an editor. They're different, and I don't think anyone is going to get a Smalltalk experience just working in Emacs.

There are not just "lisp machines", but interactive Lisp implementations, coming with an IDE. The first of those were in the 60s, using text/terminal interfaces. The first Lisp already had interactive interface and end 60s "BBN Lisp" had a full-blown resident development environment, also using "images". In the 70s Smalltalk was developed (providing images, garbage collection, ... like Lisp before), then also on dedicated machines - at the same time frame Lisp was put onto these machines. BBN Lisp was then morphed Interlisp-D by Xerox, which was "Interlisp" ported to the Xerox D machines, running on the metal with a GUI added.

The Interlisp timeline gives an idea, that a lot of research into interactive development took place in the 60s and 70s, using it.

https://interlisp.org/history/timeline/

GNU Emacs is based on a Lisp system, but the focus was (is) to build an user-programmable, extensible editor, not to resemble a "lisp machine", which was a computer with an operating-system.