I had a moment where I considered switching to emacs when reading that section. Would love to see the workflow of one of the devs from that time.
(I don't necessarily no-sell all that boosterism, either. The most basal ancestor of today's GNU Emacs dates to the mid-1970s; if the 'Lindy effect' holds true, it really is the 100-year editor.)
Text input is so much faster, and of you're typing a lot, keyboard <-> mouse movements slow you down.