My experiences cover roughly the same period (early 2000s through August 2023), and then I switched to VSCode. I switched partly because I was sick of the kludge-y nature of Emacs -- yes, it could do anything, but there was a lot of tinkering to enable it. The problem with this stuff is that you never escape it -- 10 years later, you are still replacing packages or tweaking packages, or finding new issues with a newer package... I got tired of it. Even though I liked Emacs Lisp OK, I came to feel it was a big productivity drain.

But although I've used VSCode since (mostly for TypeScript development), I can't say that I like it. It is forever showing me things (pop-ups) I didn't ask to see, and it has problems working with WSL2 (it doesn't seem to notice filesystem changes correctly), etc. As usual, though, I am busy enough with real work that worrying about the ideal development environment has had to take a back seat.

So it's possible I will eventually return to Emacs. More likely I will find some other tool. I'm tired of the Emacs way of doing things, even though I think the architecture of the editor was brilliant.