I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER.
But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found VS Code to give me nearly all the same productivity I had before, but with practically no configuration, and in an editor that actually has reasonable per-pixel scrolling. (Emacs added per-pixel scrolling in 2017 but still got it wrong somehow.)
In some mysterious psychological way that I don't fully understand, per-pixel scrolling helps me to mentally keep my place significantly faster and easier than per-line scrolling.
Similar to the two sibling posters, I find pixel-scrolling (particular with the weighted momentum feeling you get on macos) to be more visually comfortable and easier to track.
I found it frustrating in spacemacs that I couldn't get this set up properly (and I'm not even sure if it's possible too). Everything else in emacs was eye-opening and fun.
But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found VS Code to give me nearly all the same productivity I had before, but with practically no configuration, and in an editor that actually has reasonable per-pixel scrolling. (Emacs added per-pixel scrolling in 2017 but still got it wrong somehow.)