The problem is that they aren't reinventing emacs.
The first person that makes emacs for the hoi polloi will suck up all the emacs people as well just based on interop frustrations.
I still can't believe that after seeing how slack just released irc for grandma's and pointy haired bosses that no one has done the same for a sensible defaults for normies emacs.
IRC -> Slack was basically a less capable electron based GUI on top of what IRC offered.
Imagine a less capable electron based GUI on top of what emacs offers and I bet you'd get reasonably close to vscode.
Yes! An honest to God, real, opinionated distribution of Emacs, with only curated packages with rules and regression testing actually enforced by the package managers. That would be neat.