At the risk of rehashing all the same-old arguments back and forth, one thing I like about Emacs is it's pretty lightweight and manageable on an old machine. You can bulk it up (and I do) but it's a lot kinder on comparatively-old hardware than something like VSCode.

Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping :)

Edit: I actually used machines where we could use emacs only if there wasn't anyone else online

Maybe these days that should be updated to "(only) Eight Megs and Consistently Snappy"

Emacs is many things, snappy is not one of them.

For added fun, try opening a huge file, or one with extremely long lines, and watch Emacs chug.

Now open the same file in VSCode and watch it handle the file just fine.