Agreed. There's a reason no popular infrastructure-as-code tool uses only sed, awk, grep, and /bin/sh. It's the same reason git is a unified project instead of a set of instructions for using rsync, patch, diff, and sha256.
With emacs in particular, I'm just frustrated because the learning curve is steep. It's taken me months of effort to be almost as productive in Spacemacs as I was in a week with VS Code and a few add-ons. I know the longer I put in the effort, the more my Spacemacs productivity will continue to improve. But it's a hard sell on novices.