I'm not the person you asked but I chose Emacs over VSC because it's just a better fit for a lot of things for me. I do think the telemetry Microsoft harvests through VSC is an issue to consider. While it is "just" metadata and no file content, they're getting your entire project structure down to file extensions. I don't see why I would want Microsoft to know what I'm working on. Anyway, the key point for me was ORG mode and that plugins for Go and C++ suck(ed?) in VSC. There are other things, the intellisense is slow, the vim plugin is terrible, the constant Microsoft product pushes are annoying, there is no Magit and so on.

I think it's important to say that I don't dislike VSC as such at this point. Because I probably made it sound like I think it's terrible. I don't I think it's ok. I didn't mind using it for Typescript as an example. Over all I think it's average at best. I get why people use it, it's easy to setup. It's easy to share configurations and so on. I probably would have gone from vim to neovim if it wasn't for doom emacs though.

I think the major advantage both emacs and vim have though is that they're always good. A lot of VSC users are now switching to Zed and that hamsterwheel will go on and on. With vim or emacs you'll never really have to change anything.

Vim (used to be?) insanely much faster on large files, it’s already installed everywhere, it has built-in highlights for all languages under the sun, configuration is easier to sync around (in my opinion).

That said, I use both, and jetbrains.

Why did it have to win?

Emacs is fundamentally different, vscode is only convenient if there is no intention to change things.

Tangent: Despite the misleadingly similar naming, Visual Studio and VSCode are two completely different MS products. I too use VSCode for most of my programming these days, but since I don't currently program for Win32 or UWP or .NET, I haven't seen a reason to install Visual Studio even though I have a Windows machine and they have a zero-cost Community Edition.

Can’t run vscode in that black box thingy.

I'm familiar with Visual Studio (in my professional persona) and Code. Too many dials and knobs and displays. Telemetry is not a huge issue for me, but I understand why it bothers some people.

I had been jumping back and forth between Vim and Emacs for several years in my hobbyist persona for years. When in hobbyist mode, I prefer to avoid anything that reminds me of my professional mode.

VS and Code are noisy and intrusive. Emacs and Vim (and Neovim) are not.