This article seems to assume that people who criticize Emacs don't understand that Emacs isn't a monolith, and that the various features are modules. I'd guess

This article seems to assume that people who criticize Emacs don't understand that Emacs isn't a monolith, and that the various features are modules. I'd guess the majority of people who say "Emacs is bloated" do get this. The author fails to understand what people really mean by this criticism. I'll just speak for myself here, because that will make phrasing easier; the point is that for me a text editor doing most of the things the author describes (running shells, handling email, todo lists, etc.) makes no sense. For me, a text editor should first and foremost be a great text editor. Secondarily it can be nice to have integration with Git or other tasks that are intimately related to the files I'm going to be editing with the editor. But why would I ever want my editor to do all those other things? I have a window manager for that. Or at least a shell. The comparison of Emacs to a shell kind of illustrates my point; a shell only exists to facilitate managing of files and processes. It being able to run any command you want is its whole purpose. Emacs was originally an editor, and the community grew its capabilities from there. (I'd argue that it grew during an era where it having so many modules with so many capabilities made more sense than today, but that's another conversation.) The comparison of Emacs to a web browser is better than the comparison to the shell. But this comparison still misses the mark, because browser based apps have several advantages (and disadvantages) over native apps, they are fundamentally different because of the technologies involved. Using Emacs to do things like email, manage your shell sessions, etc. is a bit different from running another mail client, or running separate shell processes, etc. but they are not fundamentally different from each other in the same way. Whether you're running Emacs locally or remotely, you can run separate mail clients, etc. the same way. Anyway, my point is not that Emacs has no reason to exist, but it comes down to this; personal preference. The only reason to use Emacs the way the author does is because you like it.