> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

Unironically, maybe VS Code.

Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)

Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.

What about writing a quick ad-hoc command? Something I would have found useful today, which I would have done in emacs fifteen years ago, was writing a command to parse a file in a log, generate a curl command from it, and copy the command to the clipboard. Could I do that in VSCode without creating an entire project?