I’m not sure this is true. The enormity of the amount of things that need to be configured before it becomes usable leads new people to use things like Spacemacs etc. This means they rely on other peoples’ config, and aren’t able to customise the editor for themselves.

The same issue exists in Vim. So many nice features of Vim (such as file management using buffers) are underused, because by default they aren’t configured in a usable way.

Otoh Vim has some good stuff out of the box that emacs sorely needs. Completion? ^N/^P and the same prefixed with ^X are very useful, no configuration required, and I have not found anything like that for emacs. Ctags works out of the box. It's a bit weird that cscope integration is worse (you need a script that scans up your directory hierarchy to find the database; ctags support has this built in). In emacs you can install the xcscope package but it's miserable compared to vim's built-in cscope support, and doesn't integrate with evil's tag stack.. sigh.

> Completion? ^N/^P and the same prefixed with ^X are very useful, no configuration required

For each their own I suppose. I despise those bindings and use the tab key instead, like nearly every other program that has completion.

I remember using emacs for C programming with make. M-x compile worked out of the box. I don't think emacs culture would suffer if TypeScript worked out of the box today.