People like Emacs for different reasons. Here’s my PoV and story.
I started using serious editors for serious programming ~ 15 years ago. I tried out Emacs first, didn’t like it (partly because of all the undeserved flack it was getting). I switched to Vim, became a power user and then, after a few years, I got to the point where I had multiple programs written in multiple languages, some of them interactive, some of them compilable … to handle all these things in the same time (especially the interactivity), Emacs simply felt better. It stayed competitive all these years as it matured through its packages. I cannot imagine writing a serious piece of software without ivy, or vertico, magit, and others (it would have been a different set of packages just six years ago) . Of course, my build is heavily customised so t it fits like a glove.
Also, I love Lisp and other Lisp-based languages.
Truth to be told, even if some other editor eventually overtakes emacs, Emacs is emblematic for Free Software, GNU and FSF and this is why I am going to continue using it. Microsoft is the only thing Microsoft cares about. Suddenly they figured they need to swim in a world dominated by Free software. The consequence is the takeover of github and products such as VSC.