This. Emacs came from GNU which GNU is not Unix; Emacs it's a tool to give Unix users freedoom (and a Lisp, OFC) from the Lisp Machines RMS used to use. Also, Emacs it's really huge, the closes to a "Posix Emacs" would be mg, as it's included under the OpenBSD base, but sadly it doesn't support Unicode. If it supported it, tons of Emacs users would use it as a quick editing tool, as 'mg' still launchers faster than 'emacs -nw -Q'.

And, as you said, Emacs and Lisp were for big machines, and Emacs it's like psychodelic/progressive rock: something to freely experiment creatively without machine restrictions. If you improvise "live", as jazz masters do (Lisp Machines), the better.

Unix would be like techno music from Kraftwerk: simple but well made beats and samples -machine made-, repetitive, they sound automated. But once they are put together they create something new and brilliant. Some people remix these samples and they create crazy stuff like the songs of The Avalanches, too. Kinda like Unix orthogonality between small tools and pipes.

Very different philosophies, but mixing GNU (Unix clone) and Emacs (Emacs from ITS was distinct from GNU Emacs) created something really powerful. For instance, you could automate mail and usenet fetching and sending data in the background with daemons (freeing resources for Emacs and unblocking I/O) and hack the frontend/parsing code like crazy, Or Telega, with telega and telega-server as the daemon to talk with Telegram, or even something like Mu and Mu4e for Email. Or simply, EMMS calling mpv in the background for audio and video playing -you can watch movies fom Emacs- (and mpv itself to yt-dlp for online videos) seamlessly.

In the art world, that would be like industrial music, a mix between automatization and improvisation, and, FFS, Ministry and some Prodigy songs were 100x better than Techno subgenres and every Hair Rock and Heavy Metal band with the same poses and tropes everywhere...

Just to clarify, Emacs came from ITS, predating GNU by IIRC almost a decade and even the actual construction of any Lisp machines. GNU Emacs was at least the fifth Emacs, following the original PDP-10 Emacs, Multics Emacs, Zmacs, and Gosmacs.