No disrespect to Stallman, but it's hard for me to understand what problem he's trying to solve here. Various unofficial packages have made Emacs usable to me in my work as a software engineer, which combined with Emacs's unparalleled text editing capabilities and keyboard shortcuts make it a powerful tool indeed. Without many of those unofficial packages, I would be forced to use VS Code or some alternative.
In my observation, Emacs has been moving in the right direction, addressing outdated aspects and sources of lagging performance, and adding essential features like LSP support natively. I hope that Emacs contributors and maintainers can keep this focus.
My take on some of these comments as someone who has used Emacs almost exclusively for my day job for around 4 years:
Emacs is not rock solid.
It's easy to bring Emacs to a standstill with something as simple as a long string. This is especially apparent outside Linux, e.g. on Mac OS (Windows is a whole other story). It's a fundamental flaw in the text editor, and I don't know if there is any solution on the horizon.
Text editing can also become noticeably slower once many of the must-have Emacs packages are in use.
At the same time, becoming somewhat proficient at Emacs and knowing a thing or two about Emacs Lisp has made me a better programmer, and certainly more productive in the use of my editor.
If Emacs can solve some of its performance issues, and perhaps make things like the Debug Adapter Protocol easier to set up, it will continue to be in a league of its own and an essential editor to many for the foreseeable future.
"A collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some outré, and potentially dangerous, ideas."
I thought this article was a good backgrounder on how we got in this situation of major news media making the nonsensical statement "the government has declared UFOs are real."
In my observation, Emacs has been moving in the right direction, addressing outdated aspects and sources of lagging performance, and adding essential features like LSP support natively. I hope that Emacs contributors and maintainers can keep this focus.