Vim and Emacs minimize magic, modern monolithic IDEs maximize magic. I think there is fundamentally no good reason why an IDE should be provided as one gigantic

Vim and Emacs minimize magic, modern monolithic IDEs maximize magic. I think there is fundamentally no good reason why an IDE should be provided as one gigantic tool, because that's not how software works. You could say Vim and Emacs aren't IDEs, they're platforms for composing IDEs. Software engineers swear by these platforms because their very structure is exceptionally well-aligned with the sort of high-quality software they want to build.