What sets Emacs apart for me is that it, unlike a lot of "unix philosophy" tools, it deliberately takes a sort of systems approach. The often used analogy is that an architect never just designs rooms in isolation, but only changes a room in the context of the house. It's the whole arrangement that matters, not its parts. And you can't infer the performance of the former from the latter.
The minimal approach to have 'one tool do one thing' ignores that all the complexity is in the interactions. People praise magit so much I think because like all other tools for Emacs, it's designed with Emacs and the common interface and language in mind. It's implicit in every extension people build.
When people today struggle how to combine all their dozens of tools from notetaking to developing, to file search to git and struggle to fit it all together I think the strength of learning Emacs comes through. My guess is that this is also one of the reasons for the popularity of VsCode as it takes a similar approach.
Emacs to me is probably one of the better examples of The Right Thing (c.f. Worse is Better essay), where UNIX is one of the canonical examples of WIB.
I really like your point about systems approach -- it's definitely a very holistic, cohesive piece of software. This is probably one of the reasons that it can be very difficult to add new features to Emacs.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as UNIX, is in fact, Emacs/UNIX, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Emacs plus UNIX. UNIX is not an operating environment unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Emacs system made useful by the Emacs lisp interpreter, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a editor, mail reader, and other necessary user interface components.
With UNIX, the integration platform is the shell, hooking simple specialized tools through pipes and the shell language.
With Emacs, the integration platform is a Lisp environment, hooking specialized Lisp tools and Unix tools through Emacs buffers (or buffers regions) using the Elisp language.
So it's an extra layer, but if you look at it in this way you can see similarities: an environment that makes it easy to compose elementary functions into an integrated whole.
In both cases, it's most suited for people who are ready and willing to build their own specialized environment on top of a powerful platform. Although many users don't and stick to the basics too.
I'm not sure there is such a big divide: emacs is the OS in a way (in the same way a browser is one these days) and the tools are all the extensions (including those built in). The union of all extensions is more than the sum of all the parts. The difference is that the interface between tools in emacs is usually much richer than in UNIX (for example a buffer is a more complex abstraction than a file).
The minimal approach to have 'one tool do one thing' ignores that all the complexity is in the interactions. People praise magit so much I think because like all other tools for Emacs, it's designed with Emacs and the common interface and language in mind. It's implicit in every extension people build.
When people today struggle how to combine all their dozens of tools from notetaking to developing, to file search to git and struggle to fit it all together I think the strength of learning Emacs comes through. My guess is that this is also one of the reasons for the popularity of VsCode as it takes a similar approach.