With terminals, you have the escapes sequences, the alternate screen, the shell capabilities. With Emacs, you have a lisp VM with a huge library of functions and buffers. I still use a normal terminal like xterm and Terminal.app, but I have eat installed and it's working great.

readline in bash and zle in zsh both default to the standard emacs bindings so you're covered there.

The emacs bindings also work in every Cocoa NSTextField on macOS.

As far as having to go and download and configure all of those, 1., you don't need to do any of that, and you certainly wouldn't need to do it all at the same time. Configuring one of those a month when you come across needing one, and you find something in the default config you don't like, is definitely doable. 2. Once you do figure out your configs, they end up in your init.el. emacs is preinstalled on macOS and a quick $pkgmanager installed emacs away on Linux. Beyond that you can ship your entire setup just by downloading your emacs.d directory or init.el.

The same goes for basically any text editor, modern or not.

1. Install Emacs

2. git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs ~/.config/emacs

3. ~/.config/emacs/bin/doom install

Now open Emacs and stuff just works. You can customize it later if you want.

I agree with your general point. People mostly want stuff that just works. Very few want to become experts (and nobody can be an expert in everything.)

As you know, Emacs is more of a super environment that’s personally customised to a single individual. It wouldn’t make sense to hand over a fitted suit to someone else who is twice your size of you and then say “put it on, it looks good on me”.