Tramp in all honesty was not that seamless, its just that these are great editors, but they were not invented in the context of the overall changes in how programming is done today. To me the biggest plus of emacs/vim is they make it easy to navigate and manipulate text, that's pretty much it.
Every other feature seems to be an after thought therefore is not subject to the same experience the modern editors have. They also have a huge learning and set up time, and can send you down configuration hell for lots of things.
Emacs is completely programmable so I don't think it needed to be invented for these specific use cases. The entire point is that you can program it to do what you want it to do!
Emacs can certainly be a little clunky at times though which can put a lot of people off. It does take some configuration and tuning for your personal preferences to feel good, but the upside is that it can do way more than the alternatives can do if someone/yourself puts in the effort to implement it. Magit is a great example of such a thing, the interface and functionality is extremely nice, even compared to something like Intelli-j's git GUI which is a pretty impressive feat!
With that being said it's not for everyone (and that's okay)!
I can't vouch too much for it as I've used it for maybe 1 hour tops, but the remote capabilities of vscode were pretty seamless for that one hour.
Emacs+Tramp definitely does not feel like you're editing locally. A surprising amount of things work, but many others will fail in annoying ways or are just clearly not supported.
