Well you kind of answered yourself. After limping with Emacs for 19-ish years, during most of which I never made the serious effort you alluded to, I finally admitted I just don't have and don't want to have the mindset that's deemed necessary to make full use of Emacs.

All of my professional experience, which is at this point substantial (though of course I make no claims that quality stems from quantity!), has showed me that smaller specialized tools always perform better -- in every meaning of the word.

To me Neovim wins because it's extremely snappy, it has no visual noise, and doesn't show me a warning from a random plugin down there in the command bar almost every minute (something which Emacs apparently will always do). And is configurable in a way I find intuitive. I never cared about all the directories where I am supposed to install my own Elisp files, and I still don't. I want a plugin manager and I want to issue commands to it: install, update, delete. Neovim's Lazy and Mason do exactly what I expect.

I was never, in almost two decades, able to look at how Emacs does things and think to myself "oh but of course it will work like that".

So no, I haven't used Emacs for anything except coding. And I don't intend to use Neovim for anything else as well (with the possible exception of lazygit integration, that one works great). Though I am also working towards having everything except my web browsers be in the terminal.

Again, many will say "skill issue" or "it's just not for you" (the smarter ones). Which, again again, I never denied. But I don't plan to mince words and I am tired of the (to me) unjustified praise for Emacs. It absolutely is not, not just for everyone, but not for most even, IMO.

If you have tamed it and find it intuitive, I am sure it empowers you. I never got to that point and I regret trying to fit in for such an extremely long time. But oh well, we live and learn. We live for sure. :)