Emacs is a repl for the programming language elisp.

It has a lot of elisp functions (1.6m lines iirc) that are very useful for shaping text including, but not limited to, almost everything that people think is so unique to IDE.

Elisp and the editor pieces within Emacs are focused on providing you the tools to manipulate text of all types and from many different sources and outputs, not just a few programming languages.

People write academic papers, books, organize their lives and yes program with emacs.

Yes it's much much more then an ide.

Whatever you do, master something and become truly fluent with it. It's worth your time and will pay you back many times over.