Long-time (25+ years) Emacs user. The first thing I do on a new installation is turn off the GUI features (like, menus and toolbars) - no-one I know who uses Emacs uses the mouse.
If you use an editor or IDE at work for a year, you might work with it for a thousand hours that first year alone. But a noisy GUI like VSCode's is optimized for just that first 30 minutes of playing around.
For me, at least, that kind of thing doesn't end up being very enjoyable long-term.
I wonder whether this was intentional or a coincidence, but for others (and maybe you) the "Lisp Machine" was a real hardware architecture unrelated to emacs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
Another long time (15+ years) Emacs user here. I similarly use it completely keyboard driven. I have seen someone use it with the mouse, though. My PhD supervisor used completely stock Emacs to do LaTeX and actually used all the menus to do stuff. Quite eye opening for me.
