To be fair it is far closer to a modern vim (modal and with a lot of similar mappings), which also gives it quite a bit of competition.

Emacs is under constant improvement and so are it’s many packages. Emacs looks like modern Emacs

Doom Emacs looks like modern Emacs.

Not a fan to be honest. I stick with vanilla so when it breaks I can read the manual. Although I know Doom works great and makes a lot of people happy, it doesn’t do anything you can’t do yourself by downloading packages and configuring them to your needs.

That is true. But it’s pretty overwhelming for a lot of folks. I was a spacemacs user. I tried to rebuild what I liked about it. It was a lot, and I didn’t quite get it there.

I finally found a good compromise though. I started over with this confing: https://github.com/susam/emfy

From there, I only needed a handful of packages and a few dozen lines of config to get to an editor that was comfy.

A modern Emacs would look like VSCode with an API that was lower level, with less built-in UI, a focus on pure text buffers, and incubated for a few years to build out more of a framework so every extension doesn’t feel completely unrelated. It’s unlikely VSCode will become that, but it’s even more unlikely to be a text editor pitched to Vim users.

Look at Nicolas Rougier’s GitHub if you want to see what a “modern” Emacs looks like.

I assume you mean https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs#readme

Yes. Also https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs and pretty much everything else in his Emacs section.

Define "modern".