Same here. Tbh, you're comment just inspired to do a deep dive on VI. Wonder how much more productivity I can squeeze out if I spend an weekend focused on it.
My latest experience with Vim was helping a friend fixing some import with a React Native project. A quick grep on one terminal (I could have used quickfix) and using the vim fzf plugin to quickly locate the file. VS Code could have done this but the context switching and UI clutter is not great there.
As for emacs, the main advantages lies in the fact that so many great tools already exist there. Things like Occur, Shell Mode and Compilation Mode (relying on Comint, a more general feature for anything REPL), Project, Eglot, and Magit.
Typescript dev ex in neovim is light years ahead of what I achieved in Emacs. Neovim’s lsp integration is better than Emacs imo. Blink.cmp is so fast.
Magit is definitely far superior to anything in neovim though and so is org mode.
But the goals with emacs is to be a complete platform for anything plain text (with a bit of extra widgets). Almost whatever you need the terminal for can be replicated there, and they will share some common convention. Mail, file manager, music players, feed readers, PKM, PIM,… Tect editing is not so great, but text actions are (Slime is the best example).
I use both, but I prefer emacs’ extensibility.
I used Emacs with evil mode for years until switching to neovim last year. It was really great.