I remember having a somewhat difficult transition from a keyboard editor to Word, Notepad, etc in the 90s. I didn't use EMACS but a similar one called EDT. I had used it so much I never thought about which keys to press, it was more like playing the piano - my fingers knew how to do what my brain wanted. Moving a mouse around and watching the cursor are additional mental activities you don't need with keystroke editors. This is one reason many Linux users are still hardcore command-line users. They get stuff done a lot faster.
Depends on the operation. There are some things, especially interacting with remote servers, that can be done with a GUI tool. For example, exploring a kubernetws cluster. Sure, you could enter 5 different commands to get the info you want, or you can use a GUI app like OpenLens that is constantly sending dozens of commands in a polling loop to display all kinds of info on one view.
I remember my school had no idea how you should set up computers before letting first graders use them so we were all constantly dragging all the applications into the trash can to hear the fun noise and see the little puff of dust.
They also all had a copy of Type to Learn Jr installed, which we were strictly forbidden from opening, and every time we were using the computers multiple people would get in trouble for playing it. A few years ago I got a couple of cheap iBook G3 laptops and the first thing I did was install Type to Learn Jr and finally play it all the way through
I'm sure emacs is great but I learned about vim and neovim first so it's kind of a done deal already, not a lot of us Linux users are open source enthusiasts with so much time that we can noodle in all different flavors of text editors.
vim works great for me shrug, if emacs works great for you then awesome
When I started with Linux, I started with vim because the tutorials I was working off used vi and vim. Once I started with vim and learned the commands, I wasn't going to switch to something else... there's a joke somewhere in there about not knowing how to exit... but I'm not making it.
If I was going to write documentation now for a Linux newbie, I'd probably pick nano to start with.
I started with nano and I hated it, I didn't understand what anything meant in the bottom bar, like what is ^X. Unironically vim was easier to understand. I know what it is now but as a new user I didn't like using it.
IIRC somebody said the eMac computers like this were actually really good for their age. Either the iMac shaped ones like that, or the ones with the half-sphere foot for a base.